I got to see Bragg perform in Austin in 1988, just before the election. After the show, he hung around with the audience to talk about politics -- not an ounce of pretense or "star" bullshit, and far less dogmatic than (ahem) some of us, at the time.
Somehow I lost track of Bragg around the time he released the song "Sexuality." Very catchy....
More recently, this....I love the mock indignation of "You Carpenters fans are just being ironic!"
Finally -- for anyone who's gotten this far -- here is Billy Bragg performing Bill Bailey's parody of a Billy Bragg song, "Unisex Chip Shop":
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Thanks to Shane for the tip....
]]>This first number of The Catholic Worker was planned, written and edited in the kitchen of a tenement on Fifteenth Street, on subway platforms, on the "L," the ferry. There is no editorial office, no overhead in the way of telephone or electricity, no salaries paid.
The money for the printing of the first issue was raised by begging small contributions from friends. A colored priest in Newark sent us ten dollars and the prayers of his congregation. A colored sister in New Jersey, garbed also in holy poverty, sent us a dollar. Another kindly and generous friend sent twenty-five. The rest of it the editors squeezed out of their own earnings, and at that they were using money necessary to pay milk bills, gas bills, electric light bills.
See also this post at Crooked Timber
]]>Not entirely sure I follow the logic here, but what the hell...Any excuse to post Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe" as Symbionese anthem is fine by me:
Being kidnapped by urban guerillas championing a make-believe revolutionary movement as an experience of personal liberation from the Establishment..... In so many ways, this version of the song is the ultimate expression of half-baked 1960s countercultural ideology in its most reductio ad absurdum form.
Then again, that is perfection, of a kind.
]]>At a seminar at Penn State last November on journalism and the future of the arts, I was on a panel to talk about book reviewing, and the editor of the CDT was on the panel also. His presentation illuminated the many financial pressures under which newspapers are operating today, which have led them to eliminate staff to which the job of being book review editor could be assigned. We talked afterward, and out of this grew the idea of having book reviews contributed by members of the local community rather than relying on reviews from syndicates written by people located elsewhere. One book reviewed recently, for example, concerned how local public libraries are faring these days, and it would have made perfect sense to have this reviewed by a local librarian; instead, the CDT picked up a review written by someone from Texas!
I am starting off as the coordinator. The CDT has given us a limit of 600 words for a review, but in addition it will print a scan of the book cover if we can provide it. My review of Jacob Hacker's book, The Great Risk Shift, published by Oxford University Press in 2006 and released in an expanded and updated edition in paperback in December 2007, was printed in today's paper.
Accompanying the review in a sidebar (which doesn't show up online) is this message headlined "Be a Reviewer": "If you are interested in writing a review of a recently published book, fiction or nonfiction, that you think members of our local community would appreciate knowing about, please send a brief note to Sanford G. Thatcher, Director, Penn State University Press, at sgt3@psu.edu. Include the title, author, and a brief description of the book and tell why you would like to review it for the Centre Daily Times."
We already have a second review lined up of a new novel by Brandeis professor of literature Edward Engelberg about a scandal involving a university professor in a college town. Our retired humanities editor, Philip Winsor, is writing this review. Our Sales & Marketing Director, Tony Sanfilippo, has recently agreed to write a review of Yale's new book by Jonathan Zittrain titled The Future of the Internet--And How To Stop It. I also recently asked Chicago to send me its new book about Richard Rorty, which I plan to review myself (having been both a former student and the editor of his best known book). I have approached a number of faculty on campus, like Michael Berube, to help with this effort.
It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses are located, and if we all were to organize ourselves in such a fashion as to help our local newspapers run reviews of these books written by people in our own communities, we can thereby help offset at least some of the damage done by the disappearance of reviews from the major city dailies. Naturally, I have an interest in this idea's catching on elsewhere because I feel a conflict of interest in having any of our Penn State Press books reviewed by the CDT, at least while I'm serving as coordinator. So I hope some of you will piggyback on our effort and get in touch with your own local paper's editor to see if there might be interest in creating such a "user-generated" book review operation in your community. Our CDT editor is really keen about this initiative, and I wouldn't be surprised if editors elsewhere would echo that sentiment.
Not coincidentally, the theme of my address as departing AAUP president in June will be self-help as a strategy for university presses!
The Maddox Brothers and Rose were deservedly known as "America's Most Colorful Hillbilly Band," which makes it frustrating not to find any footage online of them in performance. Somebody did put together a tribute to them incorporating one of their radio appearances, though:
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