Things I've been reading in order to put off working on my index, none of them Victorian

• PZ Myers reminisces about the graduate instructor from hell. While I never had an experience even remotely resembling his, Myers does make an important point: sometimes the Professor from the Ninth Circle of the Inferno turns out, in retrospect, to have shaped your development in crucial ways.

• At The Panda's Thumb, we find another installment in the Saga of the Deanonymized Amazon Self-Reviewers. This time, it's Intelligent Design theorist William Dembski. If you're going to review yourself anonymously, you could at least follow Sir Walter Scott's lead and write a serious piece of criticism.

• The Cranky Professor follows up on Timothy Burke by talking about the problem of "voice." As both of them point out, the quest for "authentic" voices of whatever type often runs aground on a number of shoals, ranging from the textual to the accidental. In the book MS that I'm avoiding even as we speak (type?), I point out that it's difficult to find a "female" voice in Victorian popular texts that rely heavily on boilerplate, recycled ideas and just downright plagiarism.

• Academicgame is also departing academia, although not shutting down her site.

• Making Light provokes an interesting comments thread on the life and death cycles of independent bookstores. The area around the University of Chicago has a wonderful run of indies, like the Seminary Co-Op. In the six years I lived there, I can remember two stores going out of business: one a mediocre chain store in a bad location (53rd Street, the main shopping area but too far away from all the other bookstores); the other a general secondhand shop which had a hard time competing with Powell's and O'Gara's for inventory. Downtown, one indie on S. Michigan died when Waterstone's came in; Waterstone's itself got done in shortly afterwards by Borders. (Or is it a Barnes & Noble? I've been away too long...) A couple of secondhand indies also vanished or mutated: Rain Dog Books, which had sky-high prices, is now a coffee shop with books attached, while Booksellers Row either moved or disappeared in a puff of smoke. A couple of commentators in the thread have pointed to Acres of Books in Long Beach, a store I visit a couple times of year when I'm staying with my parents. I wish that they were more careful in their purchasing decisions--I picked up a nice six-volume edition of William Robertson a few years ago, but there's just too much "lumber" (as one of the book collectors in my department says). The Book Baron, which sat right next to AoB, went out of business last year; I don't know if its larger Anaheim store, which had a better (albeit slightly overpriced) stock, is still extant.

• Dorothea Salo muses on the ethics of turning out more Ph.Ds. I'm not sure how it follows that obtaining a Ph.D. will somehow lead to turning out other Ph.Ds--most faculty will never see a Ph.D. candidate--but the larger question is a good one.

• I got a chuckle out of Adam Kotsko's parody of Derrida.

• The Reading Experience ponders The New York Review of Books, and finds himself distinctly unenthused.

Comments

[Dorothea Salo]

Eh, well, I wasn't completely clear, I don't think. The fiendish cleverness of this whole plot is that I have more or less been promised that this department will hire me itself if I get the Ph.D. And this department is (obviously) a Ph.D-granting one.

I could, I suppose, pursue the degree and take it somewhere that only grants MLSs. But that doesn't leave me any better off personally or financially than does taking the MLS and running!