I just learned from an entry in Heidi’s blog that at 7:30 tonight the Tivoli Theatre will show The Stone Reader, a film by Mark Moskowitz in which he tries to track down Dow Mossman, who published a critically praised first novel in 1972 and then all but disappeared. KC’s alternative newsweekly, The Pitch, recently published an article about the film. And there was (is?) an oh-so-brief exchange regarding the film on the SHARP-L list. The director will be at the Westport Coffeehouse for a discussion starting at 6:15.

Update, 11:00 p.m.: I got home from the film a little while ago, which I enjoyed it very much, and L and I discussed it at some length, leading to the following thoughts. The director was at the screening and answered questions for about twenty minutes afterwards. It’s certainly a movie for people who like to read, and for people who like documentaries. That said, however, there isn’t really much discussion in the film about what it is that’s in books that make them so compelling, as L pointed out. I don’t even really know what Mossman’s novel is about or much about his prose style. There are a few places towards the end where Mossman talks a bit about Shakespeare, but not too many long conversations about what makes Faulkner, or Heller, or Vonnegut, or Dreiser, or any of the other white male authors that the filmmaker admires, so admirable. Okay, so as this last sentence implies, I did leave the theater wondering, along with Robin Bledsoe, where all the women were. One man talks about the importance of his mother’s influence on his learning to read, and Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor come up, but I kid you not when I say that not one woman is featured speaking in this movie. In a way, this fits the film’s valorization of the masculine literary culture of late ’60s and early ’70s America. I mean, that culture is an example of why feminist literary criticism developed in the first place, right?

In the Q&A Moskowitz said that the film started as a documentary on the creative process, what fuels it and what might bring it to a halt, and the Mossman story was only going to be one part of it. But he couldn’t find Mossman, so that part just kept growing and growing. Still, the finished product focuses a great deal on the other side of the creative process: those who receive what the artist creates. There’s a great deal about learning to love to read, and the experience of reading. Some very eloquent things are said by a variety of people. At one point, Mossman says to him “You’re way beyond the ideal reader. You’re, I don’t know, you’re something else” and it’s a great moment.

Yes, I did like the film, even as I point to what might be called omissions or blind spots. The novel at the heart of the movie, The Stones of Summer, is being re-published by Barnes & Noble this fall, but you can pre-order it now, if you are so inclined.

Thinking about Jason’s post from this morning, which meditates on preservation and loss, as well as CJ’s post from a couple of weeks ago on somewhat similar themes, I am officially soliciting information from whoever cares to contribute on organizational practices, particularly when it comes to electronic tools.

I’m in the middle of a search-and-compile-bibliography phase regarding orality/literacy scholarship. Nowadays this involves searching the database, emailing the results to myself, then … I have to manually edit the results to put them into a usable format, and this usually means a word-processing document, which is a bit cumbersome when it comes time to search and/or reformat it all. The missing step, for me, is the ability to just download the database results into some software and then use that application to generate any bibliographies I might use in an article or pass out in a class.

First of all, has anyone successfully mastered the task of downloading data from the scholarly databases directly into their organizational software? I always run into problems of one sort or another.

Second, what software do you use and find helpful for such tasks? Procite? I always found it a bit unwieldy, but maybe I didn’t give it enough time to grow on me. Endnote? I’ve not used it. Something else?

The floor is now yours.

Update: Okay, somehow I pinged myself with this entry. There’s a TrackBack link from my “Sunshine and Smog” entry. Any idea how to undo TrackBack? Would that be Backtracking your TrackBack?

I just received my students’ teaching evaluations of me from Spring 2003, and they look pretty good. My evaluations for Fall 2002 were okay, but these are better. Meanwhile, online records indicate that a third of the students signed up for my Fall 2003 eighteenth-century novel class are students who have taken me before. Both of these tid-bits of information feel pretty good.

The classes that I’ve struggled the most with this year (Milton in the fall and Shakespeare in the spring) and worried the most about whether I was teaching well are the ones that received the best evaluations.

This was only the second SHARP conference I’ve attended (I attended SHARP 2001 in Williamsburg, VA, and I had a paper read for me in London at SHARP 2002), but I feel I can say with some confidence that SHARP offers a diverse and satisfying program. In fact, in almost every time slot I had to make hard choices about which papers to see and which ones to miss. I often chose sessions dealing with topics out of my time period or out of my area of specialization just to see what kind of intellectual cross-pollination might result.

In conversation with others (and in my subsequent reflection) a few topics arose that seem a natural fit with SHARP, but that I haven’t seen addressed in this venue. (Disclaimer: I do not, of course, have a comprehensive knowledge of everything presented at past SHARPs, or even everything published in Book History, the organization’s journal.) I know there are people writing about these topics, but they need to learn about SHARP, or be persuaded that they should join the organization, present at the conference, and publish in the journal.

• Representations of authorship, reading, and publishing in writing, photography, painting, film, television.
• New media, digital studies, electronic publishing, the rise and fall (and rise?) of ebooks, online bookselling and auctioning, blogging (!), PDAs, text messaging.
• Comic books and graphic novels.
• Music, the RIAA versus the world, Digital Rights Management tools.
• More on the history and future of intellectual property, the DMCA, the Creative Commons movement.
• Disability studies, “adaptive” technologies for reading and writing.
• The history and future of academic publishing and its relationship to tenure decisions.
• The role that race, gender, and sexuality have played in antiquarianism, private (discriminatory) clubs devoted to the collection and study of rare books, and the development of the academic field(s) of bibliography.

If you attended SHARP this year, or are a member, please feel free to leave your comments on this entry as to what you might like to see more work on in the future. (Of course, regular readers of this blog are also welcome to comment, as usual.)

While at SHARP I heard that someone had decided to keep quiet around me after hearing me say at lunch that I was posting blog entries on the conference. Now, I’m not one to make negative comments here about someone I’ve met. Does that make this a toothless blog? But really, if you do a search on my name at Google (provided you include the middle initial) I’m the first search result. I’d be pretty foolish (or mean-spirited) to gossip about people, knowing that they’d be able to find out what I said so easily.

I’m no more likely to write such things here than I am to write them on SHARP-L, the listserv associated with SHARP. Why would someone think that I would?

Hmm. Now I’m wondering what people were saying about me and my blog!