By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I like about The Great Gatsby at 100 is what I often like about The Great Courses in general: it gives you a deep dive into a particular topic in a way that feels accessible, but not shallow. Sheila Liming takes The Great Gatsby and looks at it through economic, class, gender, race, and cultural lenses, and the result is the exact thing I want from a book—or course—about a book: it made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby again. Does this give me new insights into the thing? In this case, it certainly did. I have read The Great Gatsby a few times, and I have taught it at different points in the past, so this was not a first encounter with the novel. But Liming’s course felt like a refresher and a set of newer insights into the text. I especially appreciated the way she moves between specific details in the novel, details from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the larger cultural world around the book. There are moments where she draws...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work. Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He i...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis  Borges’ “ The Library of Babel ” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno , and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “ Time Enough at Last. ” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible. Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels lik...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Title :  Dr. Neesen's book on wheeling by Victor Neesen, M.D. From :  New Amsterdam Book Company, 1899 What is it? A book about riding bicycles that addresses the debate about whether bicycling is healthy, for whom, and under what conditions.  The author, Victor Neesen, M. D., was a gynecologist who decided to step into the debate of the times about the health concerns regarding bicycles.  He largely argues that there are great medical benefits from "wheeling" but it can cause problems if not done right. It may also aggravate other existing ailments. Still, he believes it is a virtue to "wheel" so long as a woman is of right moral character or as he puts it on page 90: "To sum up the morality of wheeling it may be tersely said that  'a lady is a lady wherever she is.'"  Chapters cover essential topics like: Hygiene, Diseases and Ailments, The Bicycle for Women, Morality of the Bicycle, and an Appendix. It clock...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Title :  Adam Watters, importer of, & wholesale & retail dealer From :  microfiche, originally from 1800s. What is it? This is an advertisement for Adam Watters , an importer, wholesale,  retail dealer  in Upper Town, Quebec City . The brochure identifies a range of imported goods, including meats, soups, fish, and hams, and notes relationships with  suppliers from Portland, Boston, and Guelph . This type of advertisement was typical in 19th-century newspapers, serving both as promotion and public notice of commercial credibility. Thoughts There's two layers of interesting elements to this artifact.  The first is that it is microfiche that has been then added to the archive.  This makes me wonder how much of the archive is microfiche which is something I hadn't considered before.  Also, we know this because the first few pages are essentially meta-data related to the microfiche, which also tells us it...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Welcome to this new series where I explore random artifacts from one of my favorite places on the Internet, the Internet Archive .  Its biggest claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, where you can look at what a website looked like at some point in the past.  So you could go look at what the USA.gov website looked like in December, 1999 or see what this blog looked like in 2015 !  But the amount of artifacts deeply stored within the Internet Archive is endless! Why do this? Well, I'm a big fan of the public domain and open access.  I wrote an entire dissertation about making things more widely available and I spend a good part of January the last few years putting up new public domain films on my YouTube channel , which includes having to submit appeals to YouTube because companies are still claiming copyright. I like the idea of reminding folks of what's already out there to play with. I also needed a new challenge or focus for thi...

Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes "Sounds like you created a media kit." My partner said as I explained all the strategies that I had used to reach out and spread the word to get participants in my study.  I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, that's pretty much what I did.  I had meant to write this post much earlier (my data collection as in Fall of 2022) but here where are.  I think it's still a useful approach for folks who are recruiting participants in the online spaces.   For my study, it was tricky because I couldn't interview anyone I know and also, I was interviewing folks about their participation on academic pirate platforms. I had to find a way to connect with people I don't know about a thing that is illicit and hope they would be open to me recording our conversation.  And I had to find a good amount of participants (ideally 20).   I approached it in several stages. Gather I had some time while I waited for approval from my dis...

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year.  This is year #8.  You can check out previous years below: 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 As always, the details: Home :  Cranston, RI Relationship status :  Married (11+ years) Cats Owned :  1 (Bear) Other Pets :  1 mud turtle (MJ, 38'ish years old) Degrees earned : 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate) Reading since September 13, 2024 :  253 (Latest reads can always be found on  Goodreads ) Work : Senior Associate Director or AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time)  Teaching courses at College Unbound &  North Shore Community College Consultant  Facilitator, Speaker Weight : 218 pounds  Longest Distance Run This Year : 13.53 miles Fastest Pace This Year :  9:14 minutes (for 5 miles) Runs in the last year :  233 Miles run in...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Since graduation, two things have happened.  The first is that the dissertation itself has been published on ScholarWorks at UMASS Boston.  You can look, download, read, enjoy(?) the full text here .   I am particularly happy that I could make it open-access and ready for everyone to freely access.  One of the running jokes I had with the participants in the study was explaining the process of the next steps.  I would say something to the effect that, "Once I defend the dissertation, I will be putting it up on my website for a reasonable fee of $99.99."  It got a chuckle because, well, it still strikes me how many articles and books are about open-access research and are prohibitively expensive.   Now that it was available, I did my best to return to some of the communities on Reddit and elsewhere to let folks know that it had been published.  Because of the levels of anonymity with participants I mainta...

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes The day began in an unfamiliar bed, in a rented space. We had arrived the night before so that we could avoid the typical chaos of Boston commutes and just give us some breathing space before and after the graduation. It was an early start like many of the early starts throughout my time at UMASS Boston.  Rising around 5am (though I do this normally) and driving into the city to avoid tedious traffic and white-knuckling my steering wheel (audiobooks only help so much).  I did that trek for 3 years--during the 3-week intensives in June and Fridays for the Fall and Spring semesters.  When I arrived at campus, I often went for a run along the Harbor Walk, a beautiful vista of the harbor and surrounding city and islands.  Some really great sunrises to capture as well.   This morning, I would also get up and go for a run along that path to take in the morning, exercise the demons, get a hit or two of nostalgia, and sit with a pr...