Serbia prospectus

Serbia will be my 57th country tomorrow, assuming I arrive there safely. I was convinced by a local resident that I am better off holing up in Belgrade the whole time and using it as a base. The explanation made sense. From there I can possibly go to Novi Sad and possibly even Montenegro. But at least I will be able to experience Belgrade… they found me an apartment in the center of the city for 5 or so days. Should be fun, and frankly I deserve these little getaways from normal life, given how hard I work on a normal day in Egypt.

most unnerving thing about Zagreb

Most unnerving thing here, definitely, is the fact that all these complete Croatian strangers read my blog.

Someone even (half) joked that they were all walking on eggshells so as not to be outed on this page as trolls or punks of some sort.

Off to Serbia tomorrow. Zagreb has been a nice experience. Lots of good new people, but especially nice to have first meetings with people I already knew from email, namely Nathan Brown and Martin H.

McLuhan speaks of retrieval of old media, and I think one experience that has been retrieved is that of knowing people reasonably well without ever having met them. This was a staple of the golden age of letter writing, but vanished somewhat for those intermediate telephone decades. (There were many anonymous pen pals in the old days, but never too many anonymous phone pals.)

And now we are at the point again where I am coediting a book with two people I have never met! They have never met each other, either. I refer to Levi and Nick. And bizarrely, I just met someone tonight in Zagreb who knows Nick personally.

open access version

I am still on the run, but the ANTHEM BLOG EXPLAINS the open access situation with Prince of Networks clearly enough.

another grey vampire post from K-Punk

K-PUNK RESPONDS to my recent contention that the grey vampire is more a bad subjective position available to everyone rather than a type of person.

I actually agree with K-Punk when he only half-accepts this notion. Though I do think we are all capable of sucking blood under the right circumstances, I also dont want to overstate that side of things, and may have done so in the last post. There really is a character type that tends toward vampirism, while others may only lapse into it under especially straitened circumstances.