Inspired by JdoubleP’s example, I thought I’d put a little more prose into these music-sharing entries.

I really missed the boat with the Clash. I had a chance to go see them live in the early 1980s, and I declined. All I had ever heard from them were the handful of tracks that made it to the radio, and those didn’t really appeal to me. Years later, however, London Calling would be playing over and over as we edited the college newspaper all night on deadline. I could listen to that album forever.

When Joe Strummer died in late 2003, I decided I should go out and buy a copy of one of his recent albums: Global a Go-Go, which he recorded with a new band called The Mescaleros. My favorite track has to be the one I include below because it’s a celebration of the multicultural carnival one finds in more and more of the world.

Spoken: So anyway, I told him I was in a band. He said, “Oh yeah, oh yeah – what’s your music like?” I said, “It’s um, um, well, it’s kinda like…You know, it’s got a bit of, um, you know.”

Sung:Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga
Mini-cab radio, music on the go
Surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat
There’s a bunch of players and they’re really letting go
We got, Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop
Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road
Sunday boozers for chewing gum users
They got a crazy D.J. and she’s really letting go

For your temporary listening pleasure: Bhindi Bhagee (mp3, 6.8M)

• Look for these albums, too: Streetcore and Rock Art and the X-Ray Style.
• Here’s an iTunes list of music from Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I’m trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

Increasingly, the term “History of the Book” (aka “Book History”) appears inadequate to describe the varied scholarly work that is actually taking place under this rubric, and much related work is unnecessarily excluded. The title of my course last semester was “Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing,” which was cribbed and altered from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (altered because not all writing could be accurately described as “authorship”). But such a phrase is unattractively long and not at all sexy.

One of the problems with the term “Book History” is that we romanticize far too much the technology of the “book” (a problematic term itself, conjuring images of the codex to the exclusion of other printed forms), and this romanticizing blinds us to its unique (even unusual or impractical) features while also causing us to ignore evidence of other forms of communication, such as the world of orality and aurality, and their influence upon literate practices.

One of my lines of argument to establish exigence in my courses goes like this:

• Humans have been around for many thousands of years.
• We date the earliest evidence of writing to approximately 6,000 years ago.
• Print was developed even more recently than that, and in the West, just a few hundred years ago.
• While scholars disagree about how best to measure the ability to read and write, there is a general consensus that widespread literacy is a very recent phenomenon.

If we take a progressive, teleological view of history, then yes, the “book” deserves to be the center of attention: what comes more recently is obviously the best of what we are yet capable of creating. But if we have a more objective view, then we note that the “book” is barely a blip on the radar screen of human history, and that it brings with it as many limitations as it does strengths. The lamentations over the competition for our attention presented by electronic media seem silly in this light. As D. F. McKenzie and Adam Fox have shown, no medium has ever existed without its uses and meaning being altered by other media. Of course, as new media have appeared, they have often produced strong cultural anxieties. We fret over the Internet and videogames: three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope worried about the widespread availability of print.

These musings were sparked by an announcement from HoBo that led me to this website:

Centre for Manuscript and Print studies
at the Institute of English Studies (London)

A new research centre created from the merger of the Centre for Palaeography and the Research Centre in the History of the Book

Palaeography, Codicology, Diplomatic and Calligraphy; History of Printing; Manuscript and Print Relations; History of Publishing and the Book Trade; Ephemera Studies; History of Reading; History of Libraries, Collecting and Scholarship; Analytical, Descriptive, and Historical Bibliography; Textual Criticism and Textual Theory; The Electronic Book

The list of areas of study is appealing and could be greatly expanded. For one thing, what about speaking & listening and their relationship to the creation, distribution, and reception of written or printed material? I don’t mean to suggest that the design of this center is flawed, just that the question of what constitutes “book history” is much more vexed than it appears at first.

On the other hand, any field of study has to have a center…right? What’s the more expanded version of a counter-argument to what I’ve written above?

From Ian Gadd on SHARP-L:

As some of you will know, HoBo is
a website that provides information about forthcoming history of the
book conferences, seminars and lectures in the UK (and to a lesser
extent abroad). As the site is updated every week, I have been
thinking about ways of informing regular visitors about updates
without them having to visit the site each week. As a result, I have
added an ‘RSS newsfeed’ for HoBo; its URL is
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~hobo/hobo/hobo.rss. If you ‘subscribe’ to
this, brief details of all recent updates to HoBo will automatically
be listed in your RSS ‘reader’. (HoBo itself is unchanged and you can
continue to consult it as normal whether or not you subscribe to the
RSS feed.)