Slice o’ life. Free WiFi at Muddy’s Coffeehouse, next to campus. Reading Samuel Johnson for my course on eighteenth-century lit. Classic rock on the shop’s satellite radio: the Doors, Heart, Tom Petty, 38 Special, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band. Members of the KCMO Police Department Tactical Response Team come in for some java, playing air guitar. Light snow falling outside.
Palimpsest: “Open source teaching resources. Good stuff, free.”
It’s alive!
The British Library has made available online the Crace Collection of Maps of London, “the essential guide to the development of the capital from the 16th to the 19th centuries, brought together by the Victorian designer, Frederick Crace.” This exhibit is part of a BL site entitled Collect Britain, “the British Library’s largest digitisation project to date … By summer 2004 you can view and hear a staggering 100,000 images and sounds from our world-renowned collections without ever needing to visit the prestigious building in London.” (via Andrew Pink on C18-L)
“Reading is a fundamentally solitary activity, which is why readers seek other readers, trying to create a sense that they are participating in a shared activity. In the last year or so, literary bloggers have begun to take the place of the little magazines and have subtly tilted the entire critical climate.”
-David Sexton, writing in the Scotsman (via Beatrice)
In case the link to Sexton doesn’t last, here are the sites he mentions: Good Reports, MobyLives, BookSlut, Moorish Girl, Maud Newton, Old Hag, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, and The Elegant Variation.
Sexton also mentions “[m]ore formal and respectable reviews” such as Hyde Park Review, the Literary Saloon, Waterboro Library, Arts and Letters Daily, Kitabkhana, and La MuseLivre.
The nominations came fast and furious. Delegates traveled from far and wide to take part in a process to determine the future of online, collaborative creation and sharing of teaching resources. Gathered in a smoke-filled room tucked away in an obscure midwestern town, they debated into the wee hours. Sure, all the candidates had their strengths, but which would prove most likely to go the distance, to hold up to the unforeseen challenges of the future?
In the end, one candidate was the obvious choice.