Quick Study: July 2009 Archives

Mike Ely has just published a memoir about doing far-left organizing among coal miners during the 1974 energy crisis. Read it.

Longtime fan of Billy Bragg as I am, chances are the parody "Unisex Chip Shop" would never have come to my attention without YouTube. Somehow it isn't surprising that Bragg himself would enjoy the joke.

The New York Times has just published a piece of garbage (appropriate enough since it is about Dash Snow) that, among other things, refers to William S. Burroughs as an example of a 'working-class addict."

Well sure, because living off an allowance from the family fortune is one of the typical lifesty;e options of the urban proletariat.

My 250th column.

Part of this.

A sequel to this. And, come to think of it, to this.

UPDATE: In an essay from a couple of years ago, I refer to a story about a writer at a party setting his own hair on fire. This came from Rosenfeld's journal, only a few excerpts from which have been published. A proper edition of it would be worth having.

The guy with his head on fire was Lionel Abel, who, understandably, never mentions the incident in his memoirs.

The American Library Association is meeting, and tweeting, in Chicago. A report:

The nearly week-long librarian meet-up, which began July 9, delivers "over 300 educational programs" to professional bibliophiles each year--including workshops like "Collection Development: Decision Making With Data" and "When Is Nice Too Nice? Strategies For Disengaging From the Talkative Patron." Some attendees, however, haven't been entirely satisfied with the ALA programming. So they launched a "secret" Twitter account for librarians to share more intriguing professional insights....

Some librarians are exhausted by the conference's material ("I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.") Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian's sex life ("I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?").

That secret account was shut down, then relaunched. (Hat tip: Mark Athitakis.)

Via Bolerium:

We called a strike and no one came, or confessions of SDSers (An allegorical epic with footnotes). Reprinted from Black & Red, number 4, Christmas, 1968. Black & Red, Detroit. 1970, 46p., wraps cleanly separated from text but present. At head of title page: Revolutionary forum in Kalamazoo. A soliloquy by Satan, with illustrations. Indirectly a cautionary work on the dangers of mixing self-medication & political theory.
Price: $12.00

I haven't kept up with Wilco in a couple of years, but got the new album on impulse over the weekend and am liking it a lot.

The song "Bull Black Nova" in particular is fascinating because it seems like (this may be an auditory hallucination on my part) some kind of homage to Television or to Tom Verlaine. Does anybody else hear it? In particular starting around the 3:40 mark.

Something I read compared it to Neil Young, which just seems wrong, even if one of the guitars does hammer on that treble C note with Youngian persistence.

Not long ago I posted a link here to my piece about Margo Jefferson's On Michael Jackson, from early 2006 -- which, to be honest, I barely remembered reading let alone reviewing, though that says less about the book than it does about the tendency of stuff to fall out of my brain.

And so it seems almost improbable to have suddenly remembered writing this Intellectual Affairs column four years ago, inspired by Elaine Showalter's bizarre yet inane comparison of Michael Jackson's and Oscar Wilde's trials.

Among other things, Showalter wrote that the expression "gross indecency" was an example of Victorian euphemism.

Now it is true that Showalter is "a cultural critic, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University and [as of 2004-'05 anyway] R. Stanton Avery research fellow at the Huntington Library" (per her contributor's note) and no doubt all of that keeps her very busy indeed. But I still think she should find out what "euphemism" means.

My column today includes a reference to something that in the rough draft I called Social Networking Aversion Syndrome. When time came for revision, "Aversion" seemed not quite right, so I changed it to "Fatigue."

A quick search of Google just now shows that other people have already referred to SNFS -- one of them having done so a couple of years back.

This came as a surprise (my draft was the first time I recall seeing it used) though on reflection it shouldn't. After all, I knew other people had to be experiencing it.

Meanwhile -- by another and somewhat stranger coincidence -- today Bill Kristol is convinced that Alaskans would not try to find Sarah Palin in DSM:

Is there any real chance that "several" Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don't believe it for a moment. I've (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I've gone decades without "several" people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Better not to pluck the low-hanging fruit here about what counts as an intellectual among Republicans in Washington, DC and instead just point out that Borders carries DSM-IV now, and that there is one in Anchorage, where I bet at least some folks do try to diagnose their fellow citizens (for fun or for self-defense, possibly both).