This article by Kurt Vonnegut is, apparently, the kick in the pants I needed to start posting in my blog again. I've been meaning to start up again for months now, but things keep getting in the way. And the Vonnegut article isn't exactly highbrow--it's a diatribe, as someone immediately points out in the comments--but it's angry and righteous and it sure starts a conversation. And it's nice to see librarians get credit for the guts that many of us have displayed in defending intellectual liberties in this country.

In other news, I've been working on a few articles for an upcoming encyclopedia of African-American literature, to be published by Greenwood Press. I'm writing about Jupiter Hammon, George Moses Horton, Claude Mckay, and the history of African-American literary magazines. It's that last one that's giving me night sweats. As an undergraduate in English lit, I focused on Renaissance poetry, and primarily on Spenser's Faerie Queene. When I studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I read plenty of modern fiction, but there's a lot of time between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries that I sort of left out. As a result, I'm cramming as fast as I can, which is sort of terrifying and sort of fun. This weekend I have a date with a folder as thick as your wrist, and my word processor. Deadline: end of month. Light a candle for me.

I've set up my Kinja account with an embarrassment of riches, and will try to remember to transfer some of those links to my blog, for future reference.

Oh, and I think I'm going to be able to do some buying in disabilities studies and (unrelated) Indian / South Asian literatures. I'm very excited at the prospect of bulking up the collection--although having just reviewed circulation statistics for the last five years, I'm also wondering if we need to run some kind of campaign to get people to, you know, actually borrow the books.