Have I not been reading the informed blogs? This is already old: there is apparently a working version of Xanadu – Windows only. Huh? Ted Nelson (yes, the one-and-only Ted Nelson) presents it in a video here, in a Google-talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8329031368429444452. Via http://www.futureofthebook.org/archives/2007/10/ted_nelsons_still_on_the_job.html.
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/.
Pretty interesting symposium in Paris on programmed art: http://creca.univ-paris1.fr/?p=35#more-35.
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/
Finished reading Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LORSIY.html. There was nothing new for me in this book – I’d got it all studying Literary Theory and having Frans de Valk as a teacher – but it was a joy to read the full 220 pages. And I’d say it’s compulsory reading for anybody studying performance/poetry and/or rap and poetry.
Related: The Milman Parry Collection, http://www.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html.
A not very precise entry for Lord at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lord.
“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.
“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”
Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.
I am working on an article about epic poetry – well, epic poetry now, in the light of internet, new media. Hmm. Those kind of assignments (“those kind” – what does that mean?) for me are a reason to order books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. The occasion presents itself.
So today the postman brought Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Albert B. Lord’s the Singer of Tales.
I’ve read quite a bit of the shorter poetry of Olson (from the Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley) and I like his prose-essay Call Me Ishmael. Olson is a bit of a strange type, and he could be a total nuthead it seems. (Is it HC ten Berge who calls him a ‘warhoofd’ in a fairly recent piece? I don’t remember). His poetry is straight out of Pound’s Cantos in many senses, and well, I’m simply drawn toward these really long poems (that one hardly ever finishes reading completely, from first till last page).
The ideas of Lord are well-known to me, as they form the fundaments of much contemporary knowledge of oral poetry and performance – but I’ve never read the actual book. So now’s the time.
I did however recently reread Bauman’s 1970’s essay Verbal Art as Performance – it was requiered reading for Literary Theory back in 1988. Rediscovering in a sense where I’ve picked up ideas on literature…
Even een aankondiging tussendoor:
Vrijdag 15 juni, van 13.00 tot 17:00
Symposium Bundel, Boek, Blog
“Tijdens de middag zal een groep literatuurwetenschappers, bloggers, mediatheoretici, dichters en vormgevers discussieren over de implicaties van het feit dat literatuur, en met name poezie, vandaag de dag steeds minder in boekvorm tot ons komt, maar verspreid wordt via websites & blogs, of voorgedragen wordt op poetry-slams. Wat betekent dit voor onze omgang met gedichten? Hoe ziet de toekomst van het boek als fysiek object er uit?”
Sprekers:
Thomas Vaessens
Arie Altena
Cornelia Graebner
Chrétien Breukers
Samuel Vriezen
Frans Oosterhof
Gratis alhier: Letterenfaculteit Universiteit Leiden, gebouw 1162 (Van Wijkplaats 2) zaal 002.
(Georganiseerd door de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap en de Opleiding Literatuurwetenschap Universiteit Leiden.)