Stuff to read
I am in the midst of frustration with article edits and underpreparedness for class (curse you, lost hour!), so I am forcing myself not to read further in the Transformative Works & Cultures special issue on SPN. Still, I already know it’s full of fun stuff, including an essay on 
counteragent’s Still Alive in which I have a special interest, given that one of my stories shows up in the vid. (I even have a draft of the sequel! It just needs more Sam before I can post it.)
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making: We think of books as distilled artifacts of knowledge, immutable, capable of speaking across time and space, the same in the US and in France. But that wasn’t always true-books did differ, printing was a move in a larger game rather than a source of independent artifacts that could be removed from their contexts--and Johns tells the story of how books, and printing, came to be understood as a standard of fixation: how they became trustworthy. For example, “the first folio of Shakespeare boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with nonuniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging, and irregular proofing. No two copies were identical. It is impossible to decide even that any one is ‘typical.’” Any book could find itself called a “piracy,” because authors and books were part of a struggle for authority. Also challenges the idea that copy-right as initially developed by the Stationers covered only exact copies; Stationers claimed rights against condensed versions, paraphrases, and translations; they even claimed control over entire genres. Stationers and licensers alsohad a complex relationship beforelicensing was abandoned; somelicensors were quite compliant, others didn’t read the books they licensed,and many fell prey to politics for allowing or not allowing certain books through. Long but very interesting, especially given that reliability of print is once again in question now that we have all these revision histories on Wikipedia and so on.
Steven Farr, Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap: With its companion website, the book seems like a good starting place for teachers of young children trying to figure out what concrete steps they need to be taking. I am still trying to figure out what parts of the book can translate into improvements in my own teaching-increased use of assessments is clearly warranted, despite the disastrous extra amounts of work for me that portends (not to mention student resistance: they don’t like bet-the-company finals, but they’re not going to like quizzes/midterms either, I predict). A relatively quick and well-structured read; I look forward to exploring the website too.
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: Touches on a bunch of financial events and crises through Western history, though rarely in enough depth to satisfy, with some attention to the role of imperialism/foreign investment, especially in China. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t feel that the more complicated transactions were explained in a way that I could easily follow (though that may also simply be impossible). If you’re interested in how people keep making the same financial mistakes, might be worthwhile, but now I’m thinking I should read The Quants or something similar.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
counteragent’s Still Alive in which I have a special interest, given that one of my stories shows up in the vid. (I even have a draft of the sequel! It just needs more Sam before I can post it.)
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making: We think of books as distilled artifacts of knowledge, immutable, capable of speaking across time and space, the same in the US and in France. But that wasn’t always true-books did differ, printing was a move in a larger game rather than a source of independent artifacts that could be removed from their contexts--and Johns tells the story of how books, and printing, came to be understood as a standard of fixation: how they became trustworthy. For example, “the first folio of Shakespeare boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with nonuniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging, and irregular proofing. No two copies were identical. It is impossible to decide even that any one is ‘typical.’” Any book could find itself called a “piracy,” because authors and books were part of a struggle for authority. Also challenges the idea that copy-right as initially developed by the Stationers covered only exact copies; Stationers claimed rights against condensed versions, paraphrases, and translations; they even claimed control over entire genres. Stationers and licensers alsohad a complex relationship beforelicensing was abandoned; somelicensors were quite compliant, others didn’t read the books they licensed,and many fell prey to politics for allowing or not allowing certain books through. Long but very interesting, especially given that reliability of print is once again in question now that we have all these revision histories on Wikipedia and so on.
Steven Farr, Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap: With its companion website, the book seems like a good starting place for teachers of young children trying to figure out what concrete steps they need to be taking. I am still trying to figure out what parts of the book can translate into improvements in my own teaching-increased use of assessments is clearly warranted, despite the disastrous extra amounts of work for me that portends (not to mention student resistance: they don’t like bet-the-company finals, but they’re not going to like quizzes/midterms either, I predict). A relatively quick and well-structured read; I look forward to exploring the website too.
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: Touches on a bunch of financial events and crises through Western history, though rarely in enough depth to satisfy, with some attention to the role of imperialism/foreign investment, especially in China. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t feel that the more complicated transactions were explained in a way that I could easily follow (though that may also simply be impossible). If you’re interested in how people keep making the same financial mistakes, might be worthwhile, but now I’m thinking I should read The Quants or something similar.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.