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Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 37 of 38)

Winners of Comix – Ware and McSweney and Auster

McSweeney's 13
Sally Greene writes that the Chris Ware assembled McSweeney’s 13 was just named the Best of the Year’s Comix by Time magazine. The cover, Sally gave me a signed flat frameable version for Christmas since I love the book so much, was already a prize winner at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Ware has been racking up the awards as a writer and as an illustrator having been part of the Whitney Biennial 2002 (thanks to Miles for the Ware History of Art poster from that show) and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth.
from City of Glass
In a related note, I picked up the graphic novel version of Paul Auster‘s City of Glass (as turned into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli) today at lunch. The book came out in 1994 or 5 and I’d been meaning to find a copy. To my amazement, there it was in a mall Barnes and Noble’s shop. One copy.

Auster is a very complex character and a great translator. He’s struck me as American and European at the same time. A writer very much of a broad world and of very very modern sensabilities. Art Speiglman’s introduction to the graphic novel quickly convinced me that the book in my hand would be a good introduction albeit slantways into the world Auster.

Folks in the UK will have to wait til next month to get a copy when it’s released by Faber there.

Beverly McIver’s Tribute to her Mother

McIver's Moma
Spent too brief a time at Tyndall Galleries for the opening in honor of Beverly McIver’s most recent work. The subject of the show is a celebration of the life of McIver’s mother. McIver’s work has often been self portraits. Earlier as a clown with white face on and more recently in black face. McIver, who is black, has created work that is both beautiful and disturbing or at least shifted from our expectations of what portrait might mean. One of the paintings of her mother shows her in her last days in the intensive care unit. Another shows her mother clapping in delight.
I reget that I missed the gallery talk. I did get to hear others rave about it. McIver, I’m told, talked about her growth as an artist, her relationship with her mother, her new life in Tempe, AZ and more. Having grown up in Greensboro, McIver was surprised to be in an area where there are few other blacks and reflected that experience.

Wired by cursive or by typing or by keyboarding?

We all know that having to explain things in writing helps you clarify your thinking and helps you remember facts. Well at least for most of us. Good writers, that is those with good handwriting, have better grammar and better test scores or so say education researchers in a recent NYTimes article.

However, another handwriting expert, Albany -based Kate Gladstone, is quoted as saying “that while a student needs to jot down 100 legible words a minute to follow a typical lecture, someone using print can manage only 30. ‘That’s fine for class,’ she said, ‘if the class is first grade.'”

I was sent a reference to the NYTimes article (which is heavily discussed on the blog Collision Detection) by the person who has the worst handwriting, does the most compulsive note-taking, and is the single fastest typist of anyone I know.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Those of us who never managed even a C in penmanship as it was called back in the day. Those of us who were required to take typing in what was called “junior high.” Those of us who were forbidden to take any classes in creative writing or journalism until we had completed two semesters of typing. Those of us who have tried to become poets instead of novelists because we can’t imagine writing more that 5000 words on anything — and having to edit our own writing. Those of us so dyslexic that any grouping of letters seem like they might be an actual word if we could just work out the anagram in front of us.

Blood Done Sign My Name (orangepolitics.org version)

William F. Winter former governor of Mississippi recently reminded the Seminar for Southern Legislators that 1970 was a watershed year. “[A] remarkable group of so-called New South governors had been elected across the South. Running on platforms promoting racial equity, educational quality and economic development, they brought a new tone to the political arena which had been dominated for so long by the one issue of race. Their names would soon be known across the nation — names like Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, John West of South Carolina, and Linwood Holton of Virginia.”

But Tim Tyson, who was only 10 years old at the time and living not far from Chapel Hill in Oxford NC, saw a different world. The murder of black veteran Henry Marrow sparked riots and burnings and marches, showing that racial equality was far from a done deal.

Haunted by the murder story and having become in the meantime a historian (after a stint at Crook’s Corner), Tyson visited and revisited his former home town of Oxford, putting together a history of the events in the still divided town. A history that some had actively tried to erase and rewrite.

The murder is not mystery, but many mysteries surround the murder. Blood Done Sign My Name is compelling, personal, local, particular, broad and always interesting. The book also calls on us to continue to confront our shared racial problems.

The contenders for the UNC Summer Reading Program are good books as well. Tracy Kidder’s book on Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, will be the Carrboro community read. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi has won several important literary awards since it was first published. But neither of those books can compare with the power and the insistence of the history of Oxford and of Henry Marrow as told by Tyson.

I’m hoping that the Summer Reading Program will inspire future historians, some UNC students who are incoming this fall, to visit the rich resources of the Southern Oral History Collection. There they will find oral histories recorded by Eddie McCoy of Oxford who gives us more background of Oxford, the murder and the lives there before and after.

Notes:

Sally Greene and I have blogged about Blood Done Sign My Name over the past year and have had the privilege of chatting with Tim Tyson, who is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center this year.

Amazon reviews.

The official UNC Press Release about the Summer Reading Program is here.

WUNC’s State of Things featuring Tim Tyson

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featuring Tyson and Juan Williams
revisiting Oxford

UNC Summer Reading – Blood Done Sign My Name

The Summer Reading Committee has just reported in. The choice for incoming students and the UNC community for the Summer of 2005 is Tim Tyson‘s Blood Done Sign My Name.

I’ve written a lot about Tim and the book and about the NPR and UNC State of Things shows on the topic.

The UNC announcement reads:

The 2005 Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee has chosen “Blood Done Sign My Name” by Timothy B. Tyson for this year’s reading program for our incoming undergraduate students in August.

On behalf of our committee of students, faculty and staff, I write to thank the University community for your help in this selection process. We received suggestions from more than 224 people about books, types of books or general topics that covered a diverse group of topics, authors and viewpoints. That input resulted from a campus-wide email, online postings to the reading program Web page (www.unc.edu/srp/) and recommendations from alumni, members of the general public, and others sent to the chancellor’s office. We considered those suggestions and developed others through our deliberations.

Our committee concluded that “Blood Done Sign My Name” was an especially appropriate selection for a program that asks our new students to focus on discussion and dialogue about a compelling topic. We believe that the questions and issues raised by this book will provide many excellent opportunities for our new students to have thoughtful conversations in their discussion groups.

Published in 2004, “Blood Done Sign My Name” was written by Tyson, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who grew up in eastern North Carolina as the son of a Methodist minister.The author, who earned his Ph.D. at Duke University, traces his own experiences, including living in Oxford, N.C., as a white 10-year-old in 1970. That is when the murder of Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, ignited an explosive chapter in the history of racial conflict in North Carolina.

Our committee members felt that Tyson’s story was engaging and fearlessly shared his own emotions and insights about how a white person was touched by the racial tension that permeated the Jim Crow South. In recommending the book, we hope that Tyson’s candor will inspire readers to confront the fears and emotions that often attend discussions of race and to engage in a secure and energizing dialogue informed by historical clarity.

The committee’s second and third choices, respectively, were “Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer,” by Tracy Kidder, and “Life of Pi,” by Yann Martel.

Our committee has worked extremely hard since last fall to represent the Carolina community. We are grateful for the support on campus for the book selection process and for this program. Additional information about this year’s program will continue to be updated at http://www.unc.edu/srp/

Holden Thorp, Professor of Chemistry
Chair, Summer Reading Program Book Selection Committee


The official UNC Press Release
just came out as well.

Growth of Triangle Bloggers Conference!

We’ve gotten a lot of folks signed up on the wiki for the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Many more than we had planned for originally. We’ve already secured a bigger room — now a small auditorium for the conference. If you have topics you want covered or a followup lunch group topic (like a Birds of a Feather session). Go to the conference wiki.

Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
NEW LOCATION: Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Dan Gillmor will also be doing a public talk on Monday February 14, 3:30 – 5:00 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center in Carroll Hall (home of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication). If you are more interested in hearing Dan than in meeting bloggers, then this is the event for you. We will have copies of We the Media for sale and for signing at both events.

Duke Moving Image Contest – further thoughts

Just took an email query from Sarah Stirland of the National Journal about Duke Law‘s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Moving Image Contest. Sarah asked what struck me in particular about the winners.

I said:

One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future. That is the future effects of the current laws or to an imagined future. That film was from Poland! (actually a cartoon) “Music for our Grandchildren”

More often film-makers looked back either in humor as in “Stealing Home” or as documentarians speaking about the extreme difficulty of practicing their craft. “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” Then they were speaking only of the current state of the law and how it has an impact on them as individuals.

This tells me that the story of the documentarians is real and immediate. We’ve been digitizing a lot of folkloric documentaries for our Folkstreams.net project and had to wonder if such films made in the 60s and 70s could be made again in the current legal climate. The answer as “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” tell us is not without great difficulty if at all. Will all documentarians have to become lawyers?

One other perhaps obvious note. All the winners were in black and white. But these days with digital editing and cameras it’s just as cheap to do color as to do black and white. I am still wondering what that means, but I suspect that it has to do with feeling the past is more compelling, more authentic and perhaps more free (to use images from at any rate). It could also mean an unhealthy avoidance of the future.

For my earlier post on the contest results, see http://ibiblio.org/pjones/wordpress/index.php?p=223

MLK: Day, Road, etc

Taking the day off for MLK Day celebrations, Sally was one of the folks asked to speak this morning at the pre-march rally at 9:30. It was cold, after a week over over 70 degree weather. Freezing in fact. But the spirits were high and the speeches were full of fire. Although my toes were pretty cold (note to self: wear weather appropriate shoes next year), I was mostly warm. Children hid out in the Post Office lobby til they were needed or needed to march.
The growing crowd then marched to the Baptist Church almost in Carrboro where several hours of singing and speaking awaited them.
Tucker and I had other appointments and so took a warm up cup of coffee with Carrboro Alderman Mark Chilton and AudioActivism’s Brian Russell at the new 3 Cups. Mark reminded me of John Ehle‘s book, The Free Men, (Harper & Row, 1965) about the local Civil Rights struggle and the people involved. Then we speed walked back to our car.
The march went within sight of the soon-to-be Martin Luther King Blvd. Sally worked hard on that project and has written a lot about it on her blog and on her site.

UPDATE: Sally has posted her talk and her impressions on her blog.

Phil Meyer on bloggers and on Armstrong Williams

Phil Meyer’s USAtoday article dated 1/12/05 points out that bloggers have become the watchdogs of the press.
Phil also points out, in an email message, that the Public Relations Society of America has taken a strong stand on the Armstrong Williams case. As you will recall, Williams was paid to promote No Child Left Behind by the Bush Adminstration [your tax dollars at work propagandizing you]. Phil laments that the Society of Professional Journalists has not acknowledged the case at all.

Blood, Mountains, Pi and Ghost Ship

I have read all of the four books selected or under consideration for the three local let’s-read-a-book-together programs. Not only that I’ve met three of the authors and I go a long ways back with two of them. In fact, I’ve written here about two of them and their authors. (just establishing my credentials).
My SILS collegue David Carr will be leading the discussion of Tracy Kidder‘s book about Paul Framer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” in Carrboro.
UNC is deciding between Tim Tyson‘s “Blood Done Sign My Name” and Kidder’s “Mountains” with Yann Martel‘s “Life of Pi” still in the running.
The rumor or more than a rumor is that Chapel Hill will mount a let’s-read-a-book program with Bland Simpson‘s “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering.
I wrote about Kidder and Farmer’s visit here to Chapel Hill to boost a fund raiser for Partners In Health and have several posts about Tim Tyson, my connections to him and others in his book and the national NPR story on the book.
I would have trouble ranking the books, but as far as social consequence of their discussions there is no doubt that “Blood” and “Mountains” are the more important.
“Pi” is a fine literary novel that I would recommend to anyone, but not particularly for a community book that would encourage a community to confront their local unresolved issues.
“Ghost Ship” is an interesting bit of North Carolina history retold as a nonfiction novel. Whatever social and community circumstances surround the mystery are largely unexplored. If the book were paired with David Cecelski‘s “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina,” we’d get a better understanding of the people, the history and the life of the coast of NC. I did greatly enjoy reading both books while on Ocracoke Island in sight of the lighthouse there.

[more after a break — poor UNC just defeated by Wake Forest]

The shared problem and shared project of this area is the problem of facing up to our shared histories. “Mountains” uses the tales of a single man and his struggles to bring light on the history and consequences of our relationship with our sister revolutionary democracy Haiti. Though Haiti can be avoided by exoticising it, by saying it’s over there across the water. Farmer would not allow that. His own book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, is strong and clear analysis of interactions of health, human rights and geopolitics. A discussion of “Mountains” can not avoid grappling with the questions that Framer makes it the business of his life to constantly reencounter. He wants us to know that mysterious Haiti is not a mystery but a part of our own doing across history.

Tyson’s book addresses many of the same questions as does Kidder’s book on Farmer. His book however is close to home. In fact not far from Chapel Hill. Not in the far distant past, but in the recent past. In 1970. Tyson tells the story of a murder that is not a mystery. As in Farmer, the “mystery” is our history and our collective doing and our decision to ignore and disown our deeds.

And the Winners are (of the Moving Image Contest at Duke Law)

Framed!Just my luck, I leave perfectly good warm pizza here in the Lab (thanks Kimberly) to sprint over to Duke Law for the announcement of the winners of The Center for the Study of the Public Domain‘s Moving Image Contest. Once I got there their pizza was cold.
You may recall that I was one of three judges for the contest; the others were Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown and FullFrame Documentary Festival‘s Laurie Racine.
The winners chosen by the three of us and the winner of the People’s Choice Online Voting were announced by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle.
As you can imagine, especially if you know the judges, there was a divergence of opinions, but we picked four very strong and enjoyable films. The People did a fine job too — since I agree with them that “Stealing Home” is particularly good.
“The contest asked for 2 minute movies about the ways that intellectual property affects art– specifically documentary film or music.”
Drop by and have a view.
Music for Our GrandchildrenLet me put in a plug for “Music for Our Grandchildren” which was produced in Poland. If you want to watch that one and you are not in Poland, then you might want to get your download from Duke.

RSS feeds of ibiblio and ibiblog

Fred and Patrick have added a list of sites with RSS feeds on ibiblio to the home page. It’s not complete — we started with our active webgroup — but it’s a giant step forward. I’ve been impressed about how much is going on. Next steps include ibiblio aggregators and publishing.
At the same time, Fred has created a group blog for ibiblio-staff to communicate with you. ibiblog is off to a good start with editting by Bret Dougherty, the Iron Dog himself.

Kuhn Ethics Paper Released (and Critiqued)

Martin Kuhn‘s paper on A Proposed Blogger Code of Ethics [PDF] to which several of you contributed is available via a link from the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference site at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. As part of the paper, Martin proposes a “Bloggers Code of Ethics” which is posted and critiqued there (you can contribute to that discussion too).
Like several of the posters, I don’t agree that you should secure permission before linking to an article.
Enjoy and put your ideas out there. Martin has given you a good place to start.

Internet helps close the Knowledge Gap

Just back from a great dissertation defense of Deb Procopio’s work on the Internet and the Knowledge Gap. One important finding (I gave my copy with makes on it back the Dr. Procopio so I’m working from memory) is that Internet use works aggressively to close the Knowledge Gap of Lower Socio-Economic Status (called SES in the trade) people. Internet use doesn’t just move up everyone’s knowledge equally although it does move everyone up. But it demonstrably and significantly helps out citizens of lower SES. Dr. Procopio worked with some large datasets from the Knight Foundation surveys covering several years and several communities and her findings were consistant throughout.
Look for more about this.

Tech Pres jokes – NetApp edition

Thomas Mendoza has been taking public speaking lessons. This is my guess anyway. And I do have a basis for it. His stance. His timing. His presence. The are all studied but casually studied and friendly.
He had several cute jokes. Here’s one.

Backgound: Yahoo! is a major client of NetApp having bought petabytes and petabytes of fileservers.

Mendoza is out to dinner a few weeks before the Google IPO. His dinner partners were the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and his boss NetApp Board Chair Don Valentine.
In the course of the meal, Mendoza pitches NetApp solutions to Google only to be rejected by Page who goes on about how Google has such brilliant people that they design their own storage systems etc and will never buy a NetApp.
Soon after the bill is delivered. Brin pushes the bill over to Mendoza. Mendoza pauses for a minute. He realizes that these folks are 1) weathier than even he can possibly imagine or will be in two weeks 2) are not going to be his customers. He says as much to Brin and passes the check back.
Brin looks up and says. We make you rich without buying a single NetApp.
How so? asks Mendoza.
We brought out Gmail with gobs of free storage which was a slap in the face to Yahoo! What did they do? They immediately called you up and bought a whole large batch of NetApps. You pay.
And Mendoza did.

Collapse-o-mania continues

Collapse: the book
The promotion and discussion of Jerad Diamond‘s new book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, continues unabated. Last week there was a full page advert in the NYTimes (as well as a review of Malcolm Gladwell‘s new book, “Blink: the power of thinking without thinking”, in the same edition). This morning, Diamond himself was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition. The interview should be online later today.
I’ve been posting on this right along — once the semester gets going I promise to read it instead of reading about it.

Observation: The word Collapse is also a key work in Robert Putnam’s bowling alone thesis in
“Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community”.
That book was answered in part by Richard Florida’s creative class thesis in
“The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life”
.

Will there be a book in answer to Diamond keying in on the word Rise?

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