Collaborative blog about 18th-century literature, with 2 excellent collaborative readings: http://long18th.wordpress.com/. The critical discussion of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson, a book by Blanford Parke, made me almost buy the book immediately…
Both Anne Helmond and Micheal Stevenson blogged the talk of Alex Galloway. The urls are in the comments, but it would be a shame if you missed them, so here they are:
http://www.annehelmond.nl/2007/10/27/alexander-galloway-the-game-of-war-mediamatic-amsterdam/
Privacy. Just one of these things that has me thinking a lot. Take for instance the new OV-chipcard (public transport card for the Netherlands). When the system will be operative, your travels are logged and identified. Hardly any public discussion on this. It’s just regarded as ‘handy for the customers”. TLS will own that data – why shouldn’t we get access to it too? We’re past the stage in history, it seems, where we can go back to an absolute notion of privacy. We leave too many traces. It will be about ownership and access to data. “I also own my Google-logs”. We have to start to reimagine our world, radically. A world where all your movements will be out in the open. Not only yours, but everybody’s movements – that of your boss, your friends, the prime-minister. Everybody will be a spook, a spy. Everybody will be surveilled. What will that mean? How would we behave in such a world? It will not be funny. (Or sometimes it might). And the new policy in the United States is not funny either with its “prior government permission” even for citizens of the US, even for domestic flights. Well, anyway.
Flusser Studies
http://www.flusserstudies.net/.
Sean Cubitt’s blog
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/.
On monday the 8th Harm Nijboer received a wel-deserved Ph.D. for his thesis De fatsoenering van het bestaan, Consumptie in Leeuwarden tijdens de Gouden Eeuw. It’s a very conscise and precise work, just over 120 pages (in Dutch), packed with knowledge. The core is a statistical analysis of probate inventories from the municipal archive of the Frisian city Leeuwarden. From that analysis he formulates critiques, hypotheses and some conclusions about the fashioning process in early modern times.
I read the whole thing on wednesday. Not knowing much about statistics, I cannot assess that part of the thesis, but apparently his methodology is quite radical and new. The chapters about consumption and the historiography of early modern consumption culture, and the chapter in which he theorizes the fashioning process are so thorough (and well written – there’s fun in there too and lots of Shakespeare!) that in the future I will certainly grab this book when I need info on this.
That said, it is a book with many links to interests of mine – like the culture of early modernity and Sentimentality, the time in which new forms of writing were emerging (for instance in The Spectator), and a new relation to publishing.
Plus, of course, the book has a theory which is relevant too for todays ‘bling-bling-culture’, and gives a good insight in the use of credit-papers in the seventeenth that is interesting in relation to todays ‘open money’ and barter-economies).
On a fun level: behind all this work lives the ghost of Lemmie, the bassplayer of Motorhead, Sentimentalism-pure.
Harm can be found here: http://home.planet.nl/~nijbo143/
While I was in Rockport, Dirk van Weelden’s new novel was published: Het Middel. In the two weeks before I helped him (with the help of Peet) setting up a wordpress-blog: http://www.dirkvanweelden.net.
Dirk has been interested in the possibilities that the internet and the computer offer for writing since the early days of good old-fashioned hypertext. He is also one of the most interesting writers of his generation. If you’re Dutch, you probably know this, but if you do not read Dutch, chances are big that you do not know him. I thought that a chapter from Mobile Home was translated in English, yet I cannot find it and I might be mistaken. In any case the essays he wrote for Mediamatic are available in English: search at http://www.mediamatic.net.
But if you read Dutch, his blog is one of the places to check out now.
As usual, dear reader, you’ll get an update after the fact. Blogging might be a form of writing that reflects the moment, a more or less immediate report of what happens now/today and is relevant right now, but in my case (and certainly not only in my case), subjects and ideas for blogposts accumulate in the mind, until, after days, I see a change and feel like writing them down. Which is now.
Writing a post to excuse oneself for not blogging for weeks, then excusing oneself for only blogging the bike-rides, and subsequently making an inventory of all the topics one would have liked to ‘blog’ but didn’t for lack of time, or whatever other reason.
So here I am: on the 23d of september, sitting in a deliciously hot sun on the roof of my apartment, catching up. And yes, that’s mainly catching up on the bike-rides, since nowadays this blog is the only place where I keep track of my rides. So that had to be done.
I would’ve like to blog the Night of the Unexpected, sometimes jokingly called the Night of the Usual Suspects, not so much because of the scheduled acts, but because you meet so many friends. This year’s Night was particularly good.
With a new set of MoHa (Morten Olsen and Anders Hana), suddenly doing a sort of fast and loud elektro-techno-free-rock. You can catch them tomorrow at DNK.
I should’ve blogged the performance of Goodiepal at DNK. He only talked. It was a concert. It was awesome. One of the best things I’ve ever seen.
I would like to write a bit on Zorn’s gamepieces, as I’m scheduled to do a small lecture on that in Groningen as part of a course on games and art. (Also because suddenly I see a connection between Zorn’s pre-game-pieces Theatre of Musical Optics and Goodiepal).
I would’ve given you my impressions of Andrew Delbanco’s Melville, His World and Work, a concise biography of Herman Melville and I guess a very good introduction to his works as well. (I find Melville mostly very difficult to read, well, not Typee, not Bartleby, but I’m still stuck in Moby Dick, Pierre and The Confidence Man.
I am now reading the new Gibson, Spook Country. Hmm, it’s not “a big disappointment”, but only because I wasn’t expecting it to be his masterwork. Honestly, I can’t ‘get into it’. I read on, because I want to finish it.
I’d rather get back to my Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract Models for Literary History of Franco Moretti. Sublime. Very good. Will write on that.
Check out Peter Luining’s blog for Youtube-footage and pictures of Oorbeek’s performance at W139: http://www.ctrlaltdelete.org/oorbeek.html
“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.