J.D. Salinger apparently owns Holden Caulfield. A U.S. federal judge has barred publication and distribution of a recent novel by a Swedish author that tells the story of a 76 year-old Caulfield.

It's bad enough that J.D. Salinger and his team of lawyers can exert complete control over his works until 70 years after he's dead. But regardless of the important strides of the Free Culture movement (free as in free speech...not free beer), things seem to continue down the path of idiocy. Under the "logic" of current copyright law, Wide Sargasso Sea or The Hours might be considered illegal.

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I joined what is probably one of the biggest reading groups in history a couple of weeks ago: Infinite Summer. The task? Read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest over the course of three months. A lot of bloggers are going to be posting responses, and we're on a strict reading schedule. (This means I have to be careful about spoilers too. I don't want to mess anything up for any other Infinite Summer-ers.)

In case you didn't already know this (it's probably safe to assume that most readers of this blog are familiar with the book), IJ is a TOME. 1,079 pages including footnotes. It sits on people's bookshelves and nags. For many, it is nothing more than a reminder of something that they never quite got around to. This (along with, I'd imagine, Wallace's recent suicide) is why Infinite Summer happened. A whole bunch of people are ready to check this off the list.

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I have been reading some of Debbie's posts about leaving one home and starting a new one (though, for her, the new home is an old one too). I'll be leaving Austin soon, and I've been pre-missing (did I make that word up?) Austin for a while now. J and I have been working our way through a "bucket list" of sorts.

Part of my bucket list involves seeing as much live music as possible, and thanks to my good friend Doug I got to see Okkervil River's taping of Austin City Limits last night.

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As you have most likely heard by now, Twitter is the medium of choice for news about the Iran protests (even the U.S. State Department is relying on it). By using the Twitter hashtag (for the uninitiated, a hashtag is a way to sort tweets) #CNNFail, the Twittersphere has signaled its displeasure with a MSM that was not paying much attention to the events in Iran. Poor CNN ended up being the sacrificial lamb for all of traditional media.

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We have all come to know the art of apologizing without really apologizing: "I'm sorry that you took my offensive comment in that way. I'm sorry that you were offended." Mel Gibson offers but one example of this.

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Please welcome Michael McGinnis to the Blogora. Michael will be attending will be attending the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory this summer, and he's been kind enough to offer to be the Blogora's correspondent. I'm sure a number of Blogora readers will be interested in the seminar Mike has been assigned: "Conservatism, Religion, History." The seminar will be led by Simon During (Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University).

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I’m currently at work on an essay that works through some ideas that emerged awhile back and that addresses the same question I took on during my CCCC presentation. I thought I'd post a chunk of that essay here, and I'd love some feedback from readers.

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It's summer, and I am hoping to catch up on reading and writing. Today, I picked up the book that I haven't read that I should have read long ago: Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media. I'm coming clean on this one, and I'd love to hear some other confessions from Blogora readers.

It's a funny thing: Academics rarely talk about the books they haven't read. This is especially true of graduate students. I remember a conversation my second year in graduate school in which everyone was admitting that they were pretty sure everyone else had read more than they had. We all think we're frauds.

Well, here is is...my big confession. I haven't read Manovich. But I promise to start in on it next week. Don't judge.

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I'm considering this. Anybody else interested?

Check out this experiment in "micro-documentary" by UT graduate student Will Burdette. Will discusses the work of Fritz Blaw in terms of Lave and Wenger's Situated Learning. Blaw is Austin's human poster filter. Burdette explains:

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Earlier today, the LA Times Twitter feed reported the following:

California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage (Prop 8) ban: http://bit.ly/hhwEg

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During the past couple of years, Nate Kreuter has been refining a visual rhetoric PowerPoint presentation for presentation in rhetoric and writing classrooms. Nate delivered this presentation to various classes at UT over the years, and he's now completed a copyright safe, Creative Commons version.

The original presentation included copyrighted images, and this made it difficult to distribute. The presentation is now available for download at Viz., and it's published under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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I was going to write this as a comment to Rosa's post below about George Will and journalism in general, but it kept getting longer...so I thought it deserved a post.

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