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We spent tonight wandering around the Taste of Minnesota festival. It wasn’t what I expected — I guess I thought it would be less fair food, more actual food. But it was still a lot of fun. Almost all the people were smiling and the light was generally great.

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In which I reinterpret an Elvis Costello album cover.

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1. Anderson Cooper devoting untold hours to analyzing Paris Hilton is the most curious, fabulous, irritating thing ever. Who else is in a better position to do this than Gloria Vanderbilt's son? An intelligent, accomplished heiress deconstructing, um, Paris.

2. Mister Husband had no idea why in the world I thought we absolutely had to watch this. Dude, Anderson just interviewed Larry King about interviewing Paris while a Temple University assistant professor offered color commentary. This sort of meta-media pileup only happens so often.

(That said, did I watch the actual interview? Yes, until the first commercial break. I couldn’t take it anymore past that.)

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Mister Husband’s dear friend Scott Sturtevant (otherwise known as Slim the Drifter) passed on about a month ago while we were down South. He died of cirrhosis at 46. I never knew him, since he had hightailed it back to Bakersfield long before I met Jeff in Arkansas. I’ve been hearing about him for years, though, and the house has always been filled with a variety of Slimiana — videos, recordings, spray-paint art, and various side projects they collaborated on in the mid-90s. (Slim is staring out at me from an 11x14 print stacked against the wall as I write this, actually.) And lately, I’ve been reading Jeff’s posts about him.

The more I know about Slim, the more I wonder why he isn’t mentioned in most SoCal punk histories (much the way Falling James isn’t). He did his time in Skinhead Manor before returning to Bakersfield and eventually morphing into a cowpunk before becoming pure rough hewn roadside Americana. At least he appears in the ‘Bakersfield Sound’ Wikipedia entry.

The more I dig through the artifacts, the more amazed I am at his talent. He was formidable, and deserves to be much better known. (His capacity for sin was as formidable as his talent, though, and I suspect it largely accounts for his obscurity. Think Townes Van Zandt. There are worse comparisons for Slim. In fact, if there was ever a meth-and-bourbon lovechild of Townes, Johnny Cash, and Tammy Wynette, Slim was it.) There’s a full upload of his Karaoke Cowboy tape here, and there’s more to come where that came from. It’s well worth a listen, even if you’re not usually into dark, inflected country that’s not really country, and there are several of you who I think might particularly like it. (Bakerina! Shannon! AKMA! George! Scrivener! Logie!)

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It's an odd little moment when you contemplate what you picked up along the way and from whom, and what of it lasted. First Love gave me my affection for

• typography
• John Waters
• early Pedro Almodovar
• religious iconography
• potato guns
• disco
• early grrrl films (Dykes on Bikes, Faster Pussycat!, etc.)
• Factory-crowd biographies
• unnatural hair color and the process of obtaining it
• sauerkraut

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Best viewed large.

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A belated shout-out to my Dad, who is a long-time conquerer of Mean Old Furnaces.

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I got an email recently from another trimalleolar patient who’s endured three surgeries so far*. Understandably, he’s quite depressed right now, and wondering if and how he’ll ever get his life back. It made my day when he said that this blog gave him hope that he could fully recover and be out and about again.

This sort of injury does eat up your life for awhile. It’s common to spend about four months in casts and boots before starting physical therapy. And even after regaining mobility, there’s still a lot of pain to deal with. I broke mine in February of 2004, and the following December I was still in so much pain that I consulted with my surgeon about taking the hardware out. We did an MRI to see what was up in there, and when it turned out that things were still fine we decided to leave it alone for the time being. Two plates and however many screws (10?) are still there now, more than two years in, and the pain lessens every month. It’s still something I have to actively manage, though. Last week, I taught for 3 hours on Monday and Wednesday, standing on my feet the entire time, and then walked 3 miles on Tuesday. I was physically capable of it, but it was really too much and I ended up with a swollen, achy ankle. So I iced it a couple of times and didn't go on long hikes much in the latter part of the week. But I still did my normal things - grocery store, two breakfasts with friends, a photography lecture, and a trip to the Farmer's Market with C (which involves lots of walking on cobblestones). Sometimes I was a little hobble-y, but not generally. I had also planned to go to the Stone Arch Festival, but didn’t make it for reasons that were completely unrelated to ankles. That would have meant some swelling, but nothing unmanageable — especially if I had gone on Saturday and rested on Sunday before teaching on Monday night.

That’s the key, I think: to keep getting out and doing as much as you can. It has been for me, anyway. Some days ‘as much as you can’ isn’t very much at all. You find out where the line is, and make sure you don’t cross it and re-injure yourself. But minor swelling and pain can be treated with ice and ibuprofen, and it’s a reasonable price to pay for regaining your life.

(More below the fold.)

There are several factors that helped me find and maintain this particular attitude:

• I had a partner who had previously sustained and recovered from the same injury. He refused to let me feel sorry for myself past a certain point. An illustration: about 16 months after my surgery, we were at the Turtle Rocks in Petit Jean State Park. I was balking at walking down them because I knew too much uneven ground would make my ankle hurt. Mister Husband said, “ Who knows when we’ll be back here again? Do you want to miss this? Come on.” We hiked down them, down a trail to a waterfall, and back. I did in fact live, and so did my ankle, and I got to have the experience. A little ibuprofen and elevation that night fixed everything up.
• I had an all-consuming project that I was working on, since I was in my second semester of PhD coursework when it happened. This gave me something else to worry about. I was very lucky, since I was teaching online and taking a course online that semester. My other f2f professor was extraordinarily understanding and let me keep up with discussions and readings from a distance. I would send my work in via email or Mister Husband, and Wonderful F2f Prof would read it aloud in class. He also read a paper for me at a conference that semester. We joked that he was the only licensed Krista-impersonator in the world. The following Fall, I went back to normal full-time teaching and coursework.
• This helped me move on from researching my condition after awhile, because I had other stuff to do. And at that point, most of what I found to read on the net was highly clinical, anyway. That’s part of why I made a point of creating this category and keeping it updated. Which brings up a related point — finding ways to help others helps you. Building that category for other patients to find and keeping it updated helped me a lot.
• Being a firm believer in writing as a means of psychological healing, I wrote through a lot of my issues with my injury. A lot of it is here, but some of it was so ugly that it went into a handwritten journal.
• I found a good massage therapist and got to work on gently breaking up the scar tissue. It’ll take many months, but it’s worth it.

So that’s what I’ve got to say about this now, 28 months from my surgery date. I’m looking forward to seeing how things progress over the next year and a half or so, since the 3-4 year period seems to be where a lot of people see another significant drop in pain levels. I’ll continue to update this category from time to time for the folks who surf in here.

*Whether or not this should ever be necessary is not something I’m qualified to comment on. But from all the stories I’ve read and had recounted to me, it seems like this should only happen in that rarest of circumstances. If you’ve surfed in here because you just broke your ankle and are looking for answers, this is not necessarily what’s in store for you. If your surgeon tells you that it is, find someone else for a second opinion immediately.

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Every degree of Knowledge is valuable. It would be an unreasonable, as well as an incommodious Sullenness in us, to refuse all light, except that of Noonday. We find our Ease and Happiness frequently depend on the doing of things by Twilight, or even Moonlight, or the still more dubious Light of, perhaps, a Rush or a Glow-worm.

Ephraim Chambers, 1728 Preface

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This is a lucky shot from a moving car. It’s also the first photo I’ve made that I think really needs to be viewed in large format in order to work correctly. (My preference would be even bigger than that, really. BIG. But that’s the best I can do here.)

I think maybe I’m about to want to start shooting in RAW format.

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(Most of these are fairly cheap. Shannon’s got the master list of free summer music posted up at her place.)

Jimmie Vaughan at Cabooze ($20.00, 7/8)
John Doe at 7th Street Entry ($11.00, 7/18)
Magnolia Electric Co. at 7th street Entry ($9.50, 8/25)
Hank III and Assjack at First Avenue (price unannounced, 8/7)

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Boulevard of broken birdie dreams.

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Edison was all about the claims to realism. (Photographed at the Edison House in Louisville. One more here.)

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Since I didn’t have a senior year of high school, I didn’t have to worry about the Senior Trip. My brother was still in the class, though, and my best friend was a year behind him, so I generally kept up with the happenings at Little Southern Baptist High. In the early spring, my old class voted on their senior trip plans. Faced with the possibility of going anywhere in the US they could scrape together the funds for, they chose ... Mall of America.

Needless to say, I felt this development confirmed my choice to move on down the road to early college admission. (Git along, little smartass, egghead doggie.) The class two years before us went to Colonial Williamsburg. The one-year-prior class went to the Grand Ole Opry. I wasn’t particularly impressed with either of those decisions, but at least they didn’t involve driving 750 miles on a bus in order to go shopping. For the next decade or so the occasional mention of Mall of America prompted much ranting from me, along with recitations of my old classmates' folly.

So when we moved to the Twin Cities, Mister Husband dragged me over there pronto. Not just once, but several times over that first summer. (Like all good spouses, he’s immune to my ability to bitch a blue streak.) Eventually, I stopped flailing about and started to regard it as a sort of Museum of Capitalism. When he quit smoking two years ago, walking the laps there was the only thing that settled the late-afternoon jitters, so that’s what we did every day. It was a good place for me to start walking any sort of distance again with a very slow-healing ankle injury. But generally, we visited a few times a year. Because who wants to go to a mall all the time? Particularly one clear across town by the airport? It’s not like MOA is any different than any other mall, really. It’s just way big and has an amusement park in the center.

This winter, though, we started to discuss finding some form of exercise we could both stand and a place we could both bear to do it. Walking Mall of America was about the only thing we could easily agree on, so we started going there several times each week. Once around is .57 miles, so it’s fairly easy to rack up some mileage. And it’s not difficult to not shop there, at least for us. We just walked around and around and made fun of window displays and people-watched. (Still and all, though, this makes me a mall walker. It hasn’t been something I particularly want to admit to people, but there it is.)

So it came to pass that toward the end of our 20 days on the road, I stood in the sun on a rolling hill in the lower plains. Watching the prairie grasses wave in the breeze as red-tail hawks circled overhead, I leaned toward Mister Husband and whispered, “I ... I miss Mall of America.” It surprised me. I didn’t want to replace the plains with a gigantic concrete monument to consumerism, but I did miss the mundane daily walks in that sort of a space. What an awful truth.

I enjoyed the prairie and the drive and coming back, and I haven’t really given much though to MOA since we’ve been back. But we’re headed over there tonight to walk in circles. And I’m a little more excited about that than I’d like to admit.

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A conversation from Saturday, when C. and I were driving around to the Farmer’s Market and then to get Thai for lunch. The topic turned toward Southern food, which I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with. I miss it sometimes, but only eat it once a year when I’m at home. Because I never eat it, it makes me ill when I do. You have to be in training for this much grease.

C: So what comes with catfish?
K: Hushpuppies. And french fries. And usually coleslaw, but sometimes green tomato relish and an onion slice.
C: So it’s basically an entire plate full of fried food, plus a vegetable covered in mayonnaise?
K: Yep. And it comes with tartar sauce, so most people dip the fish in mayo too. But I prefer ketchup. And you can order the plate in various combos, so sometimes it comes with catfish and chicken fingers, or catfish and fried shrimp, or all three.
C: Wow. You fry a lot of other stuff down there, don't you? Like okra?
K: Oh, yeah. Fried okra. My grandma used to make this thing that used eggplant or zucchini, too. Dip the rounds in egg, then in crushed Saltine crumbs, then fry them. And then melt cheese on top of them.
C: But that’s about it, right? I mean, what else can you fry?
K: Lessee. Fried okra, fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried yellow squash, french fries, fried potatoes, hashbrowns, fried sweet potatoes, fried tomatoes, fried green tomatoes, fried corn...
C: Fried corn? How do you fry corn?
K: You just do. Fried artichokes, fried cauliflower, fried mushrooms, fried onion rings, fried pickles, fried broccoli, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, fried fish, fried shrimp, fried clams, fried oysters, fried bacon, fried apples, hushpuppies, fried biscuits, fried donuts, fried bread, fried dough, fried pie...
C: Fried pie?
K: Fried Pie.

*I might add nicely that C. would admit she has no room to talk, since she comes from a place where people fry cheese. She was also a participant in the famed all-cream dinner.

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Detail from a riverfront diorama at the Sioux City Welcome Center.

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We went downtown last night for Ron Thompson’s set at the Famous Dave’s BBQ and Blues Festival. Ron’s a hard working man, and we were right at the side of the stage. It was a wildly energetic set with good sound, and he looked great too. I’ve decided that clearly I need to have a suit made just like his.

We were at the same festival last year, and it does all right. It’s a different experience than what I’m used to in a blues festival — namely, King Biscuit, which is a huge, multi-day affair during which one reclines on the Helena levee with other variously-hued blues fans and watches an outstanding string of acts. I don’t think such a thing is really entirely possible up here, although the Bayfront Blues Festival in Duluth probably comes the closest. The Famous Dave’s festival is small, in a tiny concrete park downtown, and showcases very solid but mostly second-tier acts. It draws an almost entirely white crowd that doesn’t seem particularly hardcore. (When Ron mentioned Jimmy Reed, almost nobody cheered.)

Regardless, it’s always a happy crowd, and they get down in a uniquely upper-midwest manner — lots of the best white-people dancing, and the ice cream line always stretches beyond the beer and merch lines. Ron was a blast, and everyone was particularly fun to make pictures of. I like being in the middle of it, and I’m sure we’ll be down there again next year.

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All the local Rainbow grocery stores are plastered with posters for the Cops on Top fundraiser. On our way out, Mister Anti-Authoritarian said, “I wish the cops would stay on top of the rainbow.” And right then, I was reminded of Officer Andy.

The venerable institutions for which I slung pizza followed the usual restaurant policy of feeding policemen for free. (At that time — the early-mid 90s — I don’t believe there were any female cops in the city. If there were, they weren't in my areas.) Lots of cops were regulars, but the small queer contingent was even more regular at our establishment. Family feeds family, after all. Among them was Officer Andy, who was smart, sweet, and very, very hot. He looked like a 50's recruitment poster of the Ideal Policeman: tall, slim, black hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Not too tall, not too short. Not too fat, not too thin. Just right. Needless to say, our guys loved a man in uniform.

The trouble was, Andy himself wasn’t particularly fond of his uniform. So one day, he up and quit the force. After a brief period of reflection, he launched a second career as Officer Andy the Avon Lady and built a substantial clientele among the drag community in the city. In fairly short order, he was doing far better than he ever did as a cop. The last I saw him was years ago in the University bookstore, where he was buying a stack of textbooks for his much-younger boyfriend.

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One of the things about being a grad student for years on end is that you learn how to have a lot of fun for not very much money. This seems like a useful thing to know. Out of the 20 days we spent on the road, we actually paid for two nights of hotels. The rest was generous use of family guest rooms, travel reimbursements, frequent-stay points, and credit card thank-you points.

Learning to be cheap is the price you pay for the general freedom afforded you in grad school. I’ve worked an industry job and I’ve worked this job, and it’s not new news to any of you that I vastly prefer this one. You work a lot, but you mostly pick those hours. If I’ve going to work 60 hours per week, it helps if 50 of them are my hours. Those are my school-year hours; I work less in the summers. And I didn’t work at all for the three weeks I was on the road. (Hell, I barely even read — took a stack of Ray Bradbury along, and didn’t even make it all the way through the first one off the top, Dandelion Wine. According to my anal-retentive listkeeping, I’ve read 33 books so far this year, but none of that happened on the road.) When I came back, there was still a paycheck coming in. Compatriot G. and I were talking about our luck yesterday at lunch. We haven’t gone to work in a month, and a paycheck appears! And we’re both teaching one class this summer. We’ve both spent summers filing and toiling in kitchens and painting houses and working smelt decks, and now we get to do this? And they pay us what we think is relatively good money? Two nights of my week are spoken for this summer, and on those nights I work inside, in air conditioning, never getting my hands dirty. Barring unforeseen melees, when I finish the night my clothes will look pretty much the same as they did when I started. The work is work I love to do. And the rest of my time is mine, for working on my own work and for finding my own play.

One of the best things about living in a tundra town is that the people bust loose in the summers. Minnesotans are out during the months of the year that they can be, and all summer there will be festivals and concerts and exhibitions. If they’re not free outright, there’ll be a cheap night somewhere in the run. A few days ago, I saw The Brass Kings at the Mill City Live series. (Steel guitar, washtub, and washboard. I’d never seen a washtub played before except on TV.) Then we wandered through the Daniel Corrigan exhibit (technically proficient but uninspired) and the Mill City Museum (free because of our Historical Society membership, but completely worth the usual cost of admission.)

Yesterday we ended up at the tiny-yet-amazing Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, viewing their current Mapplethorpe exhibit. (Mister Husband wrote about it.) Seeing that grouping of photographs arranged so simply in the small storefront space provided a completely different, somehow purer, experience of Mapplethorpe than I’ve previously had in larger exhibit spaces. That gallery is one of the small gems of the Twin Cities.

The magic thing is that we have the time to get out for such things. When I had a job, this never happened. When I was taking the LSAT prep course a couple of summers ago, other students were appalled that I would accept a professor’s salary instead of a lawyer’s. But the thing is, I would never want to do a lawyer’s job or live a lawyer’s work life. The Awesome Russian Lawyer’s wife and daughter are headed to Moscow and points beyond this summer, but he is staying right here and working. It makes him a little sad. It makes me a little sad for him. And when I wonder why the hell I’m not in law school, it reminds me that trading a larger salary for more time seems like an even swap to me.

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When us Sci/Tech Presentations teachers get together to carouse, we get into disagreements about the importance of demonstrative presentations and whether or not they’re worth including in syllabi. I continue to teach them simply because they were the most common type of presentation I did when I was in industry. If I had to do them all the time, then chances are pretty decent that my students will too.

I’m a-gonna use this Rancho Gordo video the next time I teach how-to presentations, I think. Since the music completely obscures Steve’s verbal delivery, it’ll be an interesting way to talk about how much and what sort of instruction is actually needed and, therefore, what decent audience analysis can accomplish.

I've come to rely pretty heavily on cooking shows for teaching how-to's, since they so completely fit the bill: scientific, technical, and demonstrative, plus it’s usually quite easy for students to figure out why the demos are successful or failures. (Or both at the same time, in the case of the Martha Stewart & Nathan Lane videos below.) I also recently dug up a couple of old Frugal Gourmet VHSs at a library sale. One of them features some truly horrific 80s French cooking, which ought to be good for something. Here’s a few others I’ve used before:

Successful:
Emeril makes Crab Remick
How to wheelie a motorcycle (not cooking-related, but still successful)

Bizarre:
Rachel Ray opens jars
Nathan Lane on the Martha Stewart Show, part 1 and part 2

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It’s official: as of yesterday, The UMN Libraries have joined the Google Book Search Project.

The University of Minnesota and 11 other Midwest universities in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) have entered into a groundbreaking collective agreement with Google to digitize up to 10 million bound volumes, nearly doubling the number of universities participating in the Google Book Search Project. ...

The contract between Google and the CIC institutions is for six years with an option to renew. Google will fund digitization of up to 10 million volumes in CIC library collections. In turn, each CIC institution will support the costs of retrieving and preparing the books for digitization. The University of Minnesota will contribute up to one million volumes from its University Libraries collections. Prior to the Google Book Library initiative, libraries estimated the costs of digitization at approximately $60 per volume, according to the CIC. Hence, the value of this project to the University of Minnesota could reach $60 million.

It’s been so encouraging to watch this effort continue to grow so much in the short time since I briefed it for CCCC. At a certain point, the momentum and value become unavoidable, even for a suit as large as Authors Guild v Google.

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I started writing conference proposals for various aspects of my diss research last November. So at this point I have some presentations lined up, one of which is SHARP in July. On the one hand: good for me, giving myself some external deadlines that I must meet or face certain public embarrassment! How well I know myself and my many, tragic flaws! On the other hand, my lazy side completely hates me for doing this to myself.

In about 35 days, I need to be able to coherently detail Ephraim Chambers’ conceptualization of encyclopedic authorship. This is totally doable, provided I don't screw around at all. And there’s the rub, because summers and their general lack of structure are never easy for me. This summer I’m teaching, which is good. But the teaching is for a long stretch two evenings a week, which throws off my usual up-at-5:30 schedule that I employ when I need to seriously get things done. So my current plan (which sort of but not totally mimics Debbie Hawhee’s) is to get to my desk by a decent hour in the morning, work on diss-related matters until 1 or so, then move to whatever other work needs to be done for the day, and then play on the evenings I’m not teaching. This will be interrupted by at least a few road trips, since there’s still some Minnesota left to see and Mr. Husband has research in Madison, but it should still generate a reasonable pile of Done.

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20 days. 4,440 miles.

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While we were driving from Louisville to Nashville, the shuffle kicked out the best old-skool driving mix, completely with an uncanny selection:

Purple Haze (Hendrix)
Down the Road Apiece (Rolling Stones)
The Wait (Pretenders)
Mr. Grinch (Mojo Nixon)
Armenia (The Who)
Poor, Poor Lenore (The Handsome Family)
My Sharona (The Knack)
F the CC (Steve Earl)
The Grip of Love (Tom Verlaine)
Eurotrash Girl (Cracker)
A BBC 4 Front Row interview with Rufus Wainwright that contained thorough discussion of “My Old Kentucky Home”* and the intricacies of Judy Garland
Brick (Pinehurst Kids)
Sweet Emotion (Aerosmith)
In the Engine Room (Mike Watt)

*The Shuffle has gone all meta this year. Last year it was more direct, and played Liz Phair’s “South Dakota” as we were, yes, leaving South Dakota. Then it played Springsteen’s “Nebraska” when we were pulling up to a hotel in Ogallala.

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I would never have thought that the antidote to exams and proposal reading would be juvenile fiction. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been looking up some of the things I read in 4th or 5th grade and sprinkling them in the midst of all the grown-up stuff, which means that I end up reading things like The Wealth of Networks, The Pleasures of the Imagination, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler all at the same time. During a winter lunch of pad thai, Em mentioned her love of The Long Winter, so when I ran across several of the Little House books in a used bookstore they went straight into the stack. She was right — they hold up surprisingly well.

So when Mister Husband spied a sign for the original Little House location just southwest of Independence, Kansas, we stopped. The cabin is a re-creation with an electrical outlet on the back, but it’s still a remarkably stirring location. The descriptions in the book place the site about 40 miles away in Nowata, OK, but evidently all the available data points to this spot 13 miles outside of Independence. All of the topographical features mentioned in the book are indeed there, and census records show the neighbors that became characters lived nearby, including Dr. Tann. The curators say they’re completely positive that the well behind the adjacent later-built farmhouse is the actual well that Pa hand-dug, and that they then tracked down the nearest foundation and rebuilt the cabin there. It’s all enough to make you believe, to stand there imagining the wagons making their way across the plains and the tribes making their forced march in front of the cabin as they were driven from the land. The amount of emotion I felt shocked me.

The women running the center that day were both part-time librarians who are wonderfully devoted to preserving the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage. One has made it her life’s goal to visit all the graves of the Ingalls and Wilder families, and she showed me her album of the houses and grave sites. One of the best parts of working there, she said, is that nobody who visits is ever in a bad mood. Even if they’re not so invested in the idea of Little House themselves, they have a daughter or wife or sister who is, and whose delight is contagious.

While we were there, a tiny blonde urchin in a pink sundress came tearing around the corner from the well. She grabbed her daddy’s hand and said, gasping, “I know how the well works! I read it in the books!” In the car later, we thought that this is really how history and conservation works. In the end, it doesn’t matter so much if this is the exact precise site, although I really, really want to believe it is. It matters that the place is alive for another eight-year-old girl, and that when she goes home and turns the faucets in her bathroom, she’ll still know how a well works, and how life worked for a little girl on the plains in the late nineteenth century.

(My Little House flickr set is here. Mister Husband's is forthcoming, I think. And the Wikipedia Article on Little House is fascinating.)

Posted at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It’s been awhile since the last one of these, eh? A lot of this is from SHARP-L, but a couple come from other sources that I (sadly) forgot to note when I filed them.

Bembo’s Zoo, a very stylish abecedarium that plays with typography.
A Harvard Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext
The Munich copy of the Gutenberg Bible has been digitized. Bettina Wagner mentioned on the SHARP-L that this copy is one of only two which contain the table of rubrics, a printed list of headlines which served as a guide to the rubricator.
Book History Online, The International Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries.
Bibliopolis, which is devoted to the history of the printed book in the Netherlands.

And finally, two essays to look into re genre and/or authorship:
Hochman, Barbara. "Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading." Book History 7 (2004), 143-170.
Satelmajer, Ingrid. "Dickinson as Child's Fare: The Author Served up in St. Nicholas." Book History 5 (2002), 105-142.

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We got back to Minnesota yesterday afternoon. There’s still some residual trip posts to come, since that fell by the wayside on the last leg.

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