The Salt-Box

Two announcements:

I’m mostly pleased to say that, as of this afternoon, I’m the president-elect (effective virtually immediately) of the CCSU AAUP chapter.  On our campus, that’s a union position, representing full-time *and* part-time faculty, librarians, and coaches.  I say “mostly pleased” because, while I care a great deal about the university, its faculty, and the role of higher education, these are obviously pretty miserable times.  The union will be voting soon on a wage/benefits concession package, and there’s no reason to think that funding for higher education will improve over the course of my term.  Frankly, I’m shocked there was another candidate!

The other reason I’m “mostly” pleased is that I’m on sabbatical for the fall, but obviously this will keep me on campus some . . . . Sigh.  That said, I’ve got debts no honest man can pay, so let the corruption and graft begin, am I right?

There may be some implications for the blog and twitter account, but they’ll probably be minor.  (Probably fewer jokes about corruption, huh?  Although I can tell you where the bodies will be buried: In the pond 2 blocks from my house. It’s convenient–I walk by it on the way home from campus.)

Anyway, to commemorate the election, here’s an obligatory Billy Bragg video, plus two by The Hold Steady: “Stay Positive” and “Constructive Summer.”

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I’m less ambivalent about the other announcement, which is that I’ll be writing in a more official capacity for the amazing Wired.com blog, GeekDad. (As will CCSU student Alex Jarvis!) I’ve written a couple of one-off posts for them in the past, and am excited to be able to do so more regularly.

So, I guess that’s it.  Union chapter president.  GeekDad writer.  If you think about it, it’s deeply, deeply funny that Merlin Mann mentioned me in a post about priorities. But, that’s why he’s brilliant.

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome McGann’s NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) group.

Another Thursday, another chance to post at Blog of a Bookslut.  The key bit:

What kind of self-deluded narcissism is required for an editor of the Times Book Review section to write, “Never mind reviews. What’s happened to proletarian literature in this country?” It’s fairer to turn this around: “Never mind proletarian literature. What’s happened to reviews in this country?” Is it really too much to ask that the Times review chancier works or ones from smaller presses? Garner pretends as though the fact that the Times hasn’t reviewed any such books means that they don’t exist.

Read the whole thing.  I suspect that more interviews are forthcoming soon, too!

My weekly post at Blog of a Bookslut is up. Topics include the new book of Guantanamo Bay detainee poems, a new edition of Blake’s illustrations of “Comus,” the “Immanent Willy,” and more.

It looks like The Salt-Box is back up and running.  It may take a day or two to get all the tires kicked–esp. w/r/t feeds and archives–but regular blogging will commence immediately.