Daisy Miller, WTF?

Dear Henry James:

Please leave off the crack cocaine*, crazy man, k thanx.

Luv,
Rose


*Seriously, she just dies? That's it? I feel so gypped**.

**Gilmore Girls has totally misled me with their obscure literature references***, thus causing me to become bitter and jaded. Thanks a lot, Rory.

***In the Season Five opener.

French Women Don't Get Intimidated by the Patriarchy

At least, not if they're Simone de Beauvoir. I just started reading The Second Sex (and by just I mean, on my lunch break, ergo, the introduction) and I am already blown away by her prose style. In a good way. I've had this on my immediate "To Read" shelf for over a year and have been avoiding it because it is a fat, smart book. I remember trying to read Ethics of Ambiguity and Being and Nothingness and totally failing. Proof positive that I am smarter now than I was in high school.

I suppose the college education I've gotten in the meantime was good for something after all. (Now if only I could make it be good for something profitable, I'd be all set.)

Very interesting post on The Valve about the future of humanities scholarship, the academic press, tenure, and alternative media (a.k.a. the InterWebs). A taste:

It’s worth beginning with a somewhat prior question about the future of the academic book, however: whether the fetishization of the monograph as the gold standard of publishing in the humanities is misguided in and of itself, not simply in the ways that such an obsessive focus obscures other worthy forms of scholarship (most notably the article), but also in its failure to recognize that the book might simply not be the best form for scholarly communication in the first place. Not long ago, I overheard a colleague tell a student that scholarly books are not meant to be read but rather consulted. If this is how we consume research in the humanities—read the book’s introduction for the overall argument; read the chapter that most clearly applies to our own questions for the detailed analysis—then is the production of the book itself no more than a vanity?

Read "On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements"