As part of year-long festivities marking the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, the writer received a true funeral on Sunday. Poe is credited with inventing dark, detective fiction, but the man led a hapless existence until his death on October 7, 1849. He was 40 years old when he died and was seen wandering the streets of Baltimore, muttering unintelligibly. Despite Poe's fame at the time, he was said to occasionally write magazine editors for $10 here and there to purchase train fare. His cousin, Neilson Poe, neglected to tell anyone of his death, and only 10 people attended his three-minute funeral.
Once a proper funeral ceremony was decided upon, several U.S. cities engaged in the battle to claim ownership of the author. Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston all wanted Poe for their own, but Baltimore's claim--"We have the body!"--seems to have been most compelling.
The cities buried the proverbial hatchet, along with a life-sized recreation of Poe's body, yesterday morning in Baltimore.
You can read Poe's original obituary, wedged between other eerie bits of news, here.
On December 1st, the new Federal Trade Commission Web guidelines will take effect, smacking violators with a potential fine of up to $11,000. The regulations require that bloggers indicate links they have to the companies whose products they endorse. The document, the FTC's first foray into Web regulation, is a response to consumer-group concerns that readers are becoming increasingly dependent on purportedly independent blogs, and that purchasing decisions are being made as a result of endorsements that lack necessary transparency. The new regulations, with their vague definitions and loose interpretations, mark a quiet attempt by government to begin acknowledging that social media has radically altered the face of advertising. Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp are among the websites that will have to adhere to the guidelines.
While some bloggers, such as Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer and Wayne Sutton of TalkSocialNews, see the rules as mere codification of existing Internet ethics, others call it a "dangerous federal intervention in social media." Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, has been furiously tweeting his disdain for the well-intentioned regulations. He calls the "non-binding guidelines," as they're called, unworkable and impractical, and says that they function on a 20th-century assumption of advertising rather than the conversational advertising that exists via social media today. Moreover, the guidelines are virtually unenforceable, and their ambiguities leave them vulnerable to manipulation for a slew of lawsuits. The word is still out on both whether other mainstream bloggers will find the FTC's gentle prod equally outrageous, and whether the rules will result in any positive change for Web transparency and those who rely on it.
Almost as soon as he took office, President Obama set the January 22nd, 2010 deadline for the closure of the detainment facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the last year, only 27 of the 250 prisoners have been relocated from the prison to other countries. Just last week, the House of Representatives voted to prevent detainees from being transferred to U.S. soil for prosecution; and, the president has faced criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike concerning his plan to move at least some detainees to the U.S. mainland upon closure of the Guantanamo facility. The funds required to close Gitmo--as it is lovingly referred to--have also been denied by lawmakers.
But stories of prisoner abuse and legal loopholes continue to threaten relationships between the branches of government and between the people and our lawmakers. Kristine Huskey, UT law professor and former director of the National Security Clinic at UT Law School, has been embroiled in the necessary dramas of Guantanamo since its inception under Bush, Jr. in 2002. Huskey has represented detainees for years now, but her high-profile cases include Rasul v. Bush, where Gitmo detainees won the right to challenge their detentions on the federal circuit, and the defense of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen detained at Guantanamo. She has been to the prison over a dozen times, and frequently tells tales of the horrific little restroom-less jet that transports lawyers to see their clients. On October 22nd, she'll be at Austin's BookPeople discussing her book, Justice at Guantanamo: One Woman's Odyssey and Her Crusade for Human Rights.
Roller derby, an American sport dating back to the 1920s, is now almost exclusively played in women-only leagues. The sport involves lapping members of the opposing team around an oval rink, and, as a full-contact sport, the risk of injury is high. Roller derby gained a following in the 1960s and again around 2002. The women who engage in this rough-and-tumble enterprise today are of a third-wave feminist culture--one that breaks-down gender binaries with a punk-rock ethic resulting in grassroots community organizing. The aesthetic is bold, and the sport has become a type of performance, blending athleticism and campy accoutrements.
Shelley Calton, a Houston-based photographer, has been chronicling Houston's "derby girls" since the resurgence in the early 2000s. From 2005 to 2008, this Bayou-City native photographed the rowdy entertainment of derby matches and leagues, as well as the women who partake in them. Her book, Hard Knocks: Rolling With the Derby Girls, explores the women's self-image and the integration of masculinity and femininity in their sport. The tongue-in-cheek humor, sexual innuendo, and outrageous, burlesque costumes juxtapose the ferocity with which these women train and approach derby. There's a mystery--a sense of empowerment gleaned from their refusal to adhere to any particular norm; from the combination do-it-yourself attitude and the stage names like "Panty Raider" and "Becky Booty." Roller derby, to these women, is a negotiation of womanhood itself.
Calton will be signing books at Domy Books, Houston, on October 15th at 7 pm. Admission is free.
Simon and Schuster announced today that it will collaborate with California-based Vook, to make a combination book-video product. A press release calls the new technology "seamless" because it integrates text and video on the same screen at the same time. Among Vook's inaugural titles are Jude Deveraux's novella, Promises, and the informational "The 90-Second Fitness Solution." We see how an informational video could be a useful supplement to textual instruction, but to throw in fiction might be dangerous. It raises questions about the quality of these videos, and what they mean for the way that we'll read and, by extension, process information. Moreover, it raises questions about what the seven-dollar vook price will do to print publications. What do you think?
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