August 2017

Notes for a Daniel Albright bio

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Notes for a biographical sketch on the late Daniel Albright, literary critic, musicologist, and theorist of historical Modernism. Albright's Wikipedia entry has a short bio and publication list. Below is a capsule discussion of his career highlights, from web and printed sources. Some additional documentation is still needed.

[Update: This article has been moved to another place of publication. If parts are edited, eventually this post will be the place for an "author's cut" of the Albright bio]

Additional Reading

Panaesthetics website -- site for Albright's next-to-last published book, Panaesthetics, serves as his personal site, posthumously maintained

Harvard Crimson obituary -- "whimsical English and music teacher" seems like faint praise for an influential thinker.

Remembrance of Albright by Andrew Goldstone, author of the book Fictions of Autonomy, in particular, how Albright inspired Goldstone's research.

parasitism 2.0

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cloudflare

For years we netizens have had the "404" page to tell us a site is down. Now we have Silicon Valley companies such as the above "adding value" to a still completely functional process. Someone got paid to design this page and come up with these pedantic and redundant explanations. An economy of uselessness rides on top of the regular economy.

egregious e-book errors: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

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The e-book version of Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth contains this passage from Chapter 2:

bag_plague

"This is how it must feel, he thought, to contract the Bag Plague, where those virtues get in and cause your head to expand until it pops like a blown-up paper bag." Virtues? What does this mean? Virtues make your head explode? Is Dick even a good writer?

The perplexed could track down the Belmont original paperback from 1964. Dick may have been a starving hack then but at least he had editors:

bag_plague_original

This bleakly funny, proto-Cronenberg-esque image of body mayhem in the opening pages of the book sets a tone for the desperate lives of Dick's underground dwellers, crowded into shelters after a nuclear world war. Theirs is not merely a dungeon of claustrophobia and rationing but one with scary new diseases. The word "viruses" is critical and important not to flub so of course the publishers type it as "virtues." This error actually appeared in a paperback edition from 1984 and has been dutifully transcribed in every copy since. Was hoping it would be caught and fixed in the e-book but it appears that Dick's estate, the current publisher, and everyone else involved is on Dick Autopilot, slinging out his books for new generations of non-readers as some kind of empty capitalist ritual.

Here's the Belmont cover:

penultimate_truth_cover