america adrift

Following up on our spring sequence of posts on The Beats (conveniently collected here), we’d like to help announce a two day conference to be held at the University of Birmingham in December. Scholars will meet and give papers on aspects of the Beat Generation with a particular focus on Kerouac’s novel On the Road. But perhaps even more enticing is that the original scroll manuscript of that novel will be present in Birmingham as well, in a rare European visit (the scroll has mostly been on display in US cities). I am very excited to finally get to see the Holy Grail of Beat artefacts up close. My paper, btw. will probably investigate Neal Cassady, the real life model for the novel’s protagonist, con-man, Holy Goof, culture hero, Dean Moriarty…

Here is the CFP in its entirety:

A two day conference at the University of Birmingham UK

(Thursday 11 December 2008 and Friday 12 December 2008)

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road’s publication in the UK, in 1958 (following its 1957 publication in the US). The University of Birmingham has arranged for the 1951 original typescript manuscript of On the Road - the world-famous scroll of 1951 - to come to the Barber Institute at the University during December 2008 and January 2009. A series of events is planned to celebrate this, including a Film Event (during the evening of 11 December) timed to coincide with this two-day conference, which will likely include the UK premiere showing of One Fast Move and I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, produced by Jim Sampas.

The conference will take as its focus the ‘Beats’ and their relations to On the Road and its themes - travel, jazz, sexuality and gender, rebellion, disaffiliation and alienation, class and ethnicity.

Plenary speakers will include Tim Hunt, Matt Theado and Oliver Harris

Please do come along to this exciting event and - if you wish - deliver a paper.

CFP: If you want to deliver a paper please submit a title for your paper and an abstract of between 100 and 250 words for consideration to: r.j.ellis@bham.ac.uk by 31 October 2008

I’m just going to link (without comment) to Historiann’s wonderfully compelling post, Feminist Art, Feminist History, and Public History: Friction in the Archives?

Plus I got to play with the words of her post title which should win this year’s “top 10 best blog post titles award.” I could wordplay all night with this but I sense a future thesis title like, “Friction in the Archives: A History of Public Feminist Art.”

ok, one comment. Art critic or not, did she have to take the “Big Eye” down?

Seriously. Great post. And I wasn’t kidding about Big Eye or the title.

The final instalment in my Beat Generation Revisited course dealt with Beat aftermaths, in the sense of what cultural legacies of the Beat Generation texts and ideals might still be present in the 21st century - whether specifically in the US, or in a Danish/Scandinavian context - or at large in a globalized space/time compressed world… For this session I had asked my students to mail in references they might have come across, whether specific intertextual references or just Beat traces and influences they thought were apparent. 10 of my great students came through with links or tips that they shared with me and the class. This post will mainly serve as a reservoir of those references… Continue Reading »

Historiann has rated our blog E for Excellent.

…and we were listed among some very good company to boot.

Thanks so much for the blog love. As I understand, we are meant to pass this rating along.

1. Historiann. Can we do that without charges of nepotism or…? Seriously, we’ve written before about how much we enjoy her blog. Colonial history, liberal politics and Friday Barbie Blogging all rolled into one. And what’s more remarkable is she’s geographically situated (like when she’s not online) in one of America’s bastions of reactionary conservatism. Ok, that might be an overstatement, but Fort Collins is certainly not a liberal oasis.”History and sexual politics 1492 to the present.” Enough said.

2. wood s lot. Bent had a short write up of this wonderful blog, “the exquisitely designed culture/theory/aesthetics portal,” a few months ago here. There’s something for everyone there kids.

3. Bag news Notes. Michael Shaw’s blog has been on the blog role here from the beginning, whenever that was.

“a progressive blog dedicated to the political, psychological and media analysis of news images, and the support of concerned photojournalism.”

Shaw has a great cast of contributors and an active intelligent community. Just read the comments and you’ll get a sense of the community. Furthermore, he’s been trying out some cool new tools to enhance the conversation. His work has largely inspired me to take the occasional, and purely amateurish, attempt at visual political analysis.

We’ve positioned our “blogs of note” blog role higher up the page and moved these three blogs to the top three spots for the month. When you drop by these sites do leave a comment or just say hello.

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One of the really great things about blogging is the reverse chronological order of posts. It’s also sometimes frustrating as more writers are posting content that older posts become quickly buried bellow the fold.

So here let me draw your attention back to some earlier articles you may have missed along the way.

First, Bent’s series on Beat Writers is definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen them all. Kerouac times, Basic Hip - Kerouac times, vol.2, Alan Ginsberg and the American Scream, Howl tape unearthed, and more recently, Dr. Benway, I presume… . See also Robert Gibbons comments below the post. Bent’s piece on Gibbons is also very much worth revisiting. His latest piece is just bellow this post.

Anne Dvinge introduced herself with, Words, Jazz, and Spaces in Between… an introduction of sorts., including a “bonus track” of “the meister of spaces in between.” Yes, it’s often the spaces in between but we hope those spaces here are not too few and far between. Again, welcome aboard Anne!

Steen’s recent and timely post, Celebrity Pastiche, looks at images of Hollywood simulating itself. It’s a fascinating article and many of the photos are quite intriguing. Simulacrum or not, the Renée Zellweger Vertigo portrayal of Kim Novak is simply stunning.

…and elsewhere out on the internets,

With Steen’s post in mind, what does this say about postmodern US politics?

The folks at East Anglia report that the US Embassy in London is supporting a live webchat to discuss the US elections. Very cool.

Tim Lacy at US Intellectual History has a piece on William F. Buckley. Oh, and for something interesting about Buckley and the Beats, see the comments here to this post.

David Nye continues his reflections on the 2008 elections. It feels like there is primary election fatigue setting in so the idea that Florida and Michigan may re-vote could jolt the presses back into hysteria.

Finally, a little musical diversion. This is Tusk , the title track (accompanied by the USC Marching Band) to Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 double album. This was the version of the band that included; Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Who does double “albums” anymore?

Enjoy.

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

Here’s the first half of a 1969 foreign policy debate between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley. Part 2 is here. You decide who actually “won” the debate. But there’s no doubt that by 1980, Buckley would become the new establishment and Chomsky relegated to the “radical left fringe.” If you’re looking for more Buckley, try this episode from the Charlie Rose Show, “An Hour With William F. Buckley Jr.” Buckley both defined and epitomized the modern conservative movement.

A few days back while reading Historiann, I saw this post. I had seen a few others like it and thought it might be fun. On the surface, this seems like one of those silly chain emails that were big in the early 90’s (I still receive them from my mother from time to time). Then Sean-Paul at the Agonist jumps in the game, untagged, and changes the rules. Well, we want to play too. Here are the original rules, slightly modified;

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences (in the comments below).
5. Tag five people (I’m tagging everyone here).

Since I had just collected four books on Richard Rorty from the library, I grabbed the one I started reading this morning. I’m looking for possible connections between Al Gore’s theory of political metaphor and Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. I know. My thesis outline and early annotated bibliography tells me I should be concentrating on historical gaps in my research but I’m still waiting on some books. So in the mean time, I distract myself with very non-pragmatic theoretical scavenger hunts and silly blogging literary games like this one. So here goes;

“Lives of Irony: Randolph Bourne, Richard Rorty, & a New Genealogy of Critical Pragmatism” by John Pettergrew in A Pragmatists Progress? ed. John Pettegrew (2000).

This somewhat unfair comparison nevertheless points to an intriguing implication of Bourne’s late intellectual biography: initiation into world war- the one historical force most responsible for postmodernist degradation of both the self and historical consciousness- led him inot an early form of despair that would anticipate not only the alienation of the so called “Lost Generation” of the 1920s but also the epistemological fragmentation and impotency of the late-twentieth century.

We know from Bourne’s correspondence that, even before the war, he worried constantly about the ineffectuality of the intellectual and the immateriality of the critical essay. Bourne chided himself for his weak socialist politics.

This is all I’ve actually read from this particular essay. It doesn’t seem that I’ll unlock anything significant in relation to my research. But I must admit, I’m fascinated by the thought of one chiding oneself for one’s own weak socialist politics.

What is the nearest book to you right now? Pick it up and turn to page 23. Leave your 3 sentences bellow (with added commentary if you like).
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First of all, I want to thank Stuart for inviting me to blog on the Atlantic Community.
As my profile reveals, my interests are American history, politics, and gender studies, and therefore it’s only natural that the 2008 race has my undivided attention at the moment. Taking my MA thesis as my starting point, I’ll give a small lecture titled “Running for President: Does Being Male help?” at the University of Souther Denmark (SDU) next Wednesday (February 13). This lecture will highlight how cultural norms and stereotyping have influenced American voters’ behavior in the ballot boxes and why American voters, so far, have only elected men as presidents of the United States.
The 2008 race is a historical race and many Danes are interested in, and care about, who becomes the next president of the United States. For this reason, I have, together with my husband who studies political science at SDU, set up a homepage that explains the American electoral system in Danish.
I look forward to contributing to the AC and, again, thank Stuart for the opportunity.

…and hopefully the Atlantic Community will have many more to come.

Welcome to all our first time readers, and especially welcome back to all our regulars. If you are visiting for the first time or are still a bit in the digital wilderness, then follow this link to cartoon by Peter Steiner

an earlier post explaining some of the features of the AC.

The AC has experienced a fair amount of growth over the last 3 months, both in terms of web traffic (over 300 unique visitors during the last 30 days) and more importantly from the perspective of our mission statement;

“Our aim is to provide a public voice for European scholarship in American Studies, forging stronger communication between the academy and the public on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Here are some recent posts which have been part of the AC’s recent traffic boom;

Robert Gibbons

Exiled Writing, Translated Knowledge: Andrei Codrescu’s Inroads

Song of America

“They Say They Put a Man on the Moon”: Fallen Astronaut – Violence, Bodies, and Moon Art

Hillary Clinton as Political Icon

A Post-Broadcast Politics

Please feel free to leave comments for the writers. Every article has a comments link found at the end of the text.

This month, I wrote an article about the Atlantic Community which was featured in the February DAAS Newsletter. You can read the article here. If there is a theme for the current Newsletter it is online networking and blogging. David Nye is also featured with an article about his new blog. The Facebook group, “American Studies in Scandinavia.” also receives a front page mention.

Steen recently introduced himself here with his first post, “Blogging Thoughts,” where he expresses his philosophy of the medium.

If you want to read more on blogging, Sara Boxer has a timely article in the New York Review of Books simply titled, “Blogs.” Highly recommended. In the end, I doubt that you or anyone will get any closer to defining the medium or the mode of writing. At best, these assorted articles may provide a “feeling” for blogging, both as a writing form and as sites of community within various cultural contexts.

Let this post serve as an example of the undefinability of blogging.

While thinking about all the connections and references to blogging this past week, I also got to thinking about connections in general. Camelia recently posted, “Beating about Splitting Hairs.” A play off Bent’s post, “Kerouac times.” Here she mentions the new Bob Dylan film, I’m not There, as possible material for her new course. Well, if you missed the Supberbowl last Sunday then you missed the half-time show featuring Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I’m not sure how it may relate to her course, but Tom Petty was a fellow member of George Harrison’s fantastic Traveling Wilburys, along with of course, Bob Dylan. Harrison referred to the Wilburys music as, “that Americana type of stuff.” Here’s the first part to a little documentary on the Wilburys. Part 2. Part 3.

Coincidentally, I had also just finished watching the history of Brian Wilson’s Smile. One of the themes behind Smile was an obsessive transatlantic competition between the creative forces of Wilson and the Beatles. Smile is incredible. Too bad Wilson never made his version of an American led British Wilburys.

Responding to Bent’s “Kerouac times,” the director of a new Kerouac film, seemingly came out of nowhere to leave a comment, i.e., “hype his film.” You can read more about the film here. I’m looking forward to it.

Bent has also graciously invited the AC to tag along his course, “The Beat Generation Revisited”. Read more.

Well, this post has reached “the end of the line”. So to conclude, here’s the Traveling Wilburys,

This is a brief description of the basics of how to navigate the Atlantic Community .ich will hopefully put you on the right digital path.

The AC is laid out like a traditional blog. That is, it is basically a single page website with all the articles “posts” appearing in reverse chronological order. So the latest post is always at the top. At the bottom of each post, you’ll find a “bookmark” button. You can click it and add any article you like to your favorite social bookmarking sites. Digg and Stumbleupon have been our most useful thus far.

Underneath that you’ll find the following information;

Posted by Stuart Noble at 20:04 1 comments Links to this post

Labels: 2008 Race, Politics

· person who posted the article

· time stamp

· comments (where you too can leave a comment). Blogging is as much about the comments as it is about the original post.

· Links to this post (which gives you the permanent URL of the article

· Labels: these are rough categories chosen by the writer and editor to signify where the article is archived.

When reading an article on its own URL, you can find the homepage by clicking “home” which is an obscure little link all the way at the bottom of the page.

On the top right column, you’ll find “Labels.” Here you can search for past articles and posts under any given label “category.” This is not exact and many posts have multiple labels. We do not yet categorize our articles by writer but this is in the works.

The rest is self-explanatory. Let us know if you have a link or a webpage that you think we should feature. The links to various websites have thus far been chosen by me and mostly represent some of my personal favorites. This may change later to better reflect our community of bloggers as a whole.

Under the “About Us” on the left side column you’ll find “Contributors” where you can find more information about/contact each writer. Also, you can send me an email if you are interested in contributing at the AC or if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions.

We hope you like what you see so far. Leave a comment, send us an email, or just some digital good vibrations. We keep blogging on.

Stuart

Two of my distinguished colleagues - one also a husband, the other also a friend - have managed to beat me by seconds in the run for posting thoughts on the Atlantic Community. This is the second time today that men, tall men, have topped me. Now I must respond, and I can just as well announce that this post will be feministic in tone. Before I go on, however, I’m beginning to suspect that Stuart, the website editor, may be getting more than he bargained for when he asked the former (me) and current (Steen and Bent) musketeers at Aalborg U to contribute to the blog. Before I go on - here comes the second however - it should be mentioned that both Steen, the friend, and Bent, the husband, are feminists. This means that I’ll use their examples of beating women instrumentally. Steen, we’ve almost lost to Tromso (I leave out the diacritics), but he has changed his mind in the last minute and accepted a position at Aalborg U. I hereby congratulate him for coming up in the world. This means that he will get to beat about in Bent’s company, and as Bent has just announced, there’ll be a chance to revisit the whole concept of ‘beat’ breathlessly and beatifically. While they won’t miss a beat where their teaching and researching is concerned, I am bound, for now, to feel off beat, as academic life at Roskilde U runs its course as it always has, with men at the wheel and women tagging along, if they ever get noticed. Which they do, drum-wise. Today I’ve been told that upon someone’s objection to the lack of women working in the international basic studies programs, the response was this: yes, but the two working there are very feminine. Being one of them, something struck me: what does that mean?

I’m preparing for my first session of my own course: ‘I’ is another: autobiography across genres, and as I look through video material on the internet for my introductory lecture, I come across the new Bob Dylan film I’m not There. I’ve missed its running in Denmark, so I have to settle with watching some trailers.

I find myself humming to the lines ‘how does it feel’ from Dylan’s well-known tune Like a Rolling Stone. What attracts me to Dylan is that he knows how to die: rolling in the uber cosmopolitan haystack. The hair says it all; whether it’s Cate Blanchet’s hair as Dylan’s, Richard Gere’s as Dylan’s, or the up-and-coming, yet now gone already, Heath Ledger’s hair as Dylan’s, it’s all the same to me. The reason why Dylan became an icon is because he always managed to be another, and these ‘others’ that play him now, are thus the others of others. I suspect that this is what the title of the movie hints at. I try to take notice as a woman, and I ponder a line that another feminist and academic man has served me today, toppling me over: “it is only mediocrity that saves one from celebrity”. It occurs to me that I’m surrounded by feminist males who see me not only because I dye my hair for them, but also because I make an effort not to be there where the feminine, in other men’s schemes, only serves to celebrate the arrogance of presence. On the other hand, it also occurs to me that my dylanesque/rimbaudian/other absence was felt in the remarks of the students I try to teach something about the importance of the visual in American studies. Last semester some female students said that my looks are smashing. Some males said that my sense of style beats everything. Beats me why. In my own off-beatness, I must be beat.

- Camelia Elias