Tag, you're it
Scott McLemee has decided that it's better to give than to receive.
(1) Imagine it’s 2015. You are visiting the library at a major research university. You go over to a computer terminal (or whatever it is they use in 2015) that gives you immediate access to any book or journal article on any topic you want. What do you look up? In other words, what do you hope somebody will have written in the meantime?
A history of the didactic/religious fiction publishing industry in nineteenth-century Britain. (There are studies of bits and pieces of the religious publishing industry, but nothing massive and magisterial devoted to fiction.)
(2) What is the strangest thing you’ve ever heard or seen at a conference? No names, please. Refer to “Professor X” or “Ms. Y” if you must. Double credit if you were directly affected. Triple if you then said or did something equally weird.
Alas, the anecdote about the woman who did a striptease during her paper on Shakespeare belongs to a former colleague, not to me. I'll have to settle for something much less exciting: the presenter who, many years ago, explained at the start of her talk that she believed in extemporizing conference presentations. (Something about that being "authentic" or "non-hegemonic" or the like.) The result was about as you'd expect.
(3) Name a writer, scholar, or otherwise worthy person you admire so much that meeting him or her would probably reduce you to awestruck silence.
A three-way tie between Richard D. Altick, John Sutherland, and Frank Turner.
(4) What are two or three blogs or other Web sites you often read that don’t seem to be on many people’s radar?
I'm a little dull in this respect, I fear.
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