one other reason I can think of

Actually, there are a few other reasons to publish in “good” journals aside from internal university politicking, so for the sake of fairness, here’s one: they tend to have high-quality readerships, and you might not reach such organized readerships just by putting something up on the web.

For example, I’ll have a piece on literary criticism coming out within a few weeks in New Literary History. That will be largely a new readership for me, and all of those people would never have been likely to find something that I simply happened to post on a website.

So, what’s the lesson from cases like this? It’s that good journals will continue to retain value as a way of helping us to organize the world information glut. If you want to survey the state of the art in any given field, it’s a lot easier to go to a handful of leading journals than to search piecemeal through a variety of sources.

And I expect that phenomenon to continue in the next academic era. But what need not continue is the practice of articles being hidden behind subscriber-only firewalls, and articles being published 3-4 years after submission as too often happens. And I insist, the main reason people are willing to put up with these things is that their major “audience” under the current system has to be search committees and tenure and hiring committees. If you didn’t have to care about that (as I don’t care any longer) then your primary interests become speed of publication and size of readership.

the value of open access journals

A Facebook friend pointed out that the NY Times linked to a nearly forgotten piece on Heidegger and Leibniz that I published in Cultural Studies Review. It’s the second-to-last link HERE.

This is only possible because Cultural Studies Review (Sydney) is now an open access journal. It seems to me that the time for non-open access journals is passing or already past.

Why would you want to publish in a journal where your article will end up behind a Sage or Springer firewall rather than freely available to everyone? I can think of only one good reason: many of those firewalled for-subcriber journals are prestigious. And as a graduate student or junior faculty member, you are in the position of needing to impress job search committees or tenure and promotion committees by publishing in prestigious journals. If you put an article in one of the better Springer journals, that will enhance your fortunes in academia more than just posting it on someone’s para-academic website journal would do.

But it occurred to me a year or so ago that there’s no point being a tenured full professor if I don’t allow myself the freedom that goes with that. Namely, it no longer matters too much whether I’m in a prestigious journal or on someone’s website. In fact, the website will draw more readers, and faster.

Last night, Alexander Markov pulled out his iPad and was showing me a number of Russian student theses that refer to speculative realism, including my own work. To my astonishment, more than half of the footnotes to me were to posts on this blog rather than to my books.

And it makes perfect sense when you think about it. If you were a student in Moscow writing a thesis, and were a typical starving philosophy student who couldn’t afford to order a bunch of books from abroad, you would of course just follow all the blog posts as closely as you could.

In fact, I am now sorely tempted to self-publish everything other than books. I may just set up a website and post every one of my articles instead of going through the lengthy journal review process every time. We’ll all be doing that in 10 years anyway, so why not now? In the future, journals will still exist as seals of quality, clearing houses, and clutter-reducers. But I already have my readership, and may as well feed that readership more quickly than the journal system allows.

the conference so far

The conference in Perm has been going well. There are only two talks each day, which surprised me at first until I saw how they go– each talk plus the Q&A is extremely long. I’ve never seen audiences more attentive and serious for longer periods of time than Russians, or at least these particular Russians. Someone gives a 90-minute lecture and they pay attention to absolutely every word– undistracted, never checking cell phone text messages, never looking out the window, never whispering to their friends. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Today is the last day of the conference. Then there will be a bit of sightseeing tomorrow.

There are two alternating conferences venues: the Higher School of Economics (which dates to the early 1990’s and has branches in 5 cities) and the very nice Piotrovsky Bookstore, which is good enough that customers come regularly from Yekaterinburg, 6 hours by train to the east of Perm.

It looks like Publishers Weekly already noticed the store. I enjoy this quote from one of the store owners:

“The book retail scene in Perm and the Ural region is downright gloomy. To help reverse this situation, we have made an effort to provide 10 times more titles than what people expect to find—or read—in order to encourage them to read more, as they did before.”

For this event they have four of my books on a display table, along with some Latour. For today I was asked to give an overview of Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, which I’m told has already been discussed in Moscow at a public event as well.

good start in Egypt

“Power” has a bad reputation in recent thinking. But at its best, power can do good things for at least some people/parties. The below represents a surprisingly good start for Morsi, and if we’re lucky, he’ll soon find himself more interested in being President of Egypt (something he surely never dreamed he would be) than in being a Brotherhood kingpin. Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, a woman and a Christian as VP’s are exactly what the Brotherhood needed to send some signal of not being a scary patriarchal Islamist organization.

And yes, get rid of that ridiculous law. Nice work by the court.

Cairo (CNN) — Egypt’s first ever democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, will make history in another way: by appointing a woman as vice president, his policy adviser told CNN.

He will also choose another vice president who is Christian, Ahmed Deif said.

The news came as the man Morsi beat for the presidency, Ahmed Shafik, left Egypt on a trip to Abu Dhabi, and as Cairo’s administrative court overturned a rule that allowed the military to arrest people without a warrant.

“For the first time in Egyptian history — not just modern but in all Egyptian history — a woman will take that position,” Deif told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday, referring to one of the vice presidency slots. “And it’s not just a vice president who will represent a certain agenda and sect, but a vice president who is powerful and empowered, and will be taking care of critical advising within the presidential Cabinet.”

re: the Sterling Hall article

I mentioned it a week or two ago, but you can find it HERE.

At the time I struggled with the feeling I had already read the paper. Then, Mr. Hall referred me to our correspondence about it, which wasn’t even that long ago– late March.

At a certain point your email volume becomes so oppressive that you can’t remember when you spoke to people and when not.

In fact, it happened again tonight here in Perm. I’d completely forgotten that I’d corresponded in the past with fellow keynote speaker Yoel Regev (though I remembered him lecturing about SR on YouTube). But yes, as soon as he mentioned it, it all came back.

This is alarming, because there was a time when I used to forget absolutely nothing.

quick stop in central Moscow

I didn’t think I’d have any time to see Moscow on this, my first trip to Russia. (I’m headed all the way to Perm in the Ural Mountains tonight.)

But turns out I had just misread my itinerary. There was a 7-hour layover, which was plenty of time to get to the center of Moscow by train and metro.

Very nice atmosphere in the center of the city. Lots of public space, family-friendly, and people generally seem in a good mood down there.

Don’t have a camera with me, so this is what passes for photography while trying to hold a MacBook Pro at a level angle.

did they bring this on themselves?

The final vote total in Morsi’s favor was 51.7% to 48.3%. Not a cliffhanger, but also not a landslide.

Let’s say none of the last-minute things had happened including stern warnings from the Army, the court’s decision to dissolve Parliament, and a few other things that made it look like the Army was preparing for a total power grab. Is it possible that Shafik might have won?

I do believe so. Just in my own circles of Egyptian friends, I know a number of people who detest the Brotherhood but decided they had to vote for Morsi simply because the Army seemed to be behaving in an especially frightening manner.

These people weren’t usually Shafik voters (Shafik voters tended to be people who couldn’t accept the Brotherhood under any circumstances, and I do understand that sentiment). But there were a number of people who either planned to stay home or spoil their ballots in protest who suddenly decided that Morsi looked like the minimally more revolutionary candidate due to the Army’s actions. (That’s basically where I am personally as well.)

Was it enough people to have swung the election in the other direction? I don’t know, but possibly.

most tiresome cliché in sports

A player whose first or last name has the “oo” sound in it, and when fans cheer out his name, the announcer has to wittily inform us that they’re not saying “boo,” but rather the player’s name. That was an amusing thing in the 1970’s, but pretty old by now.

Limousin in September

João Florencio called my attention to THIS announcement.

Yes, I’m planning to do this, though some logistical things need to be worked out first.

Funniest tweet from the election results

Iyad El-Baghdadi @iyad_elbaghdadi

“50 million Egyptians voted in these elections. And now, I’ll read out their names…” #Egypt #EgyPresElex

That’s pretty much what it felt like. Took them over an hour of talking to announce the winner.