Flickr user, Lorabelle, recently moved to Bluffton from upstate New York. She’s already captured some great images of the Lowcountry’s natural beauty. Here’s one of the May River–the lifeblood of the town.
Locals are rightly concerned about the state of this precious tidal river, given the massive development (and run off from said development) taking place in Bluffton at this time.
Nebraskans are notorious for being straight shooters. Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator from the Cornhusker State is no exception. Earlier this week Hagel took President Bush to task for his comments criticizing Americans who would dare question his decision making in regards to the war in Iraq. Given that Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet, he has strong legs to stand on.
According to U.S. Newswire, Hagel said, “the Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them.”
Hagel also said the Vietnam War “was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late. To question your government is not unpatriotic — to not question your government is unpatriotic,” Hagel said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. “America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices.”
You may have noticed our shiny new logo. It comes to us courtesy of graphic novelist, Max Riffner.
If you enjoy comics, please support Max by purchasing his work. You can also read it online or download it for free, but be a good netizen and buy it too. Cool? Cool.
Pinion raised his fists in mock combat. “I’d kill a few of them sum’bitches before they even touched me with one of their ropes, by God. The sight of all that white trash under the sheets gets me hot enough to shit fire.”
Ron Hogan of Galley Cat, details the brouhaha over Brad Vice’s short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
The University of Georgia Press (the book’s publisher) has announced that it is withdrawing the collection from bookstores.
“On October 13,” according to UGA’s official statement, “the Press learned from the Tuscaloosa Public Library that one of the stories in Vice’s collection, ‘Tuscaloosa Knights,’ contained uncredited material from the fourth chapter of the first section of Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, a publication of the University of Alabama Press. UGA Press immediately froze stock of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train and contacted Brad Vice for his response. Vice admitted that ‘Tuscaloosa Knights’ borrows heavily from Stars Fell on Alabama and that he had made a terrible mistake in neglecting to acknowledge Carmer’s work. He further stated that he had done this without any malicious intent whatsoever.”
In addition to recalling the book from circulation and allowing the publiciation rights to revert back to Vice, UGA will also re-assign the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction it gave Vice last year to one of the other finalists.
In his apology to UGA, which he made available to Galleycat when contacted for a statement, Vice acknowledged that he relied heavily on Carmer’s description of a 1927 Klan march in writing “Tuscaloosa Knights.” “I made a terrible error in judgment by omitting to acknowledge this due to my ignorance concerning the principles of fair use,” Vice concedes. “I am sad to learn the omission will mean the demise of the book, a labor of love I have been working on since I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. Though I am deeply saddened by this prospect, I am made even more sad by the impression of impropriety these allegations of misconduct have left on my hometown, a place I care for deeply. This book was supposed to be my love letter to Tuscaloosa, and I am grieved that it would be read in any other way.”
Ironically, this controversy may end up helping Vice sell more books. Especially, if Vice is vindicated of any wrongdoing. Jake Adam York of Story South is one of Vice’s defenders.
When I first read Vice’s story — he sent it to me and to Jim Murphy so we could reprint it at Thicket, the site we’ve dedicated to Alabama writing — I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing. He had written his story right on top of Carmer’s, set his own characters in the very Tuscaloosa Carmer described among the very Klan that disgusted Carmer. It seemed to me a clear case of allusion.
To make the case for intentional, deceptive plagiarism, one must say that Vice’s intention is to hide from us the inspiring and well-quoted source, must say that Vice assumes we will not (could not) make the connection between his work and Carmer’s. It assumes that Vice’s quotation is meant not to evoke Carmer’s text but to pillage and thereby erase it.
I discovered a new poet yesterday while browsing the available reading at Bluffton Coffee House. His name is Matthew Thorburn and his first book of poems is Subject to Change.
Here’s the first stanza of a poem I’m particularly fond of:
Black coffee, for starters, and sun
sneaking through a scribble
of cloud. Holidays over and still
in from out east: you and me,
Kay, and cold day-old light–
dishwater or thereabouts. And pale,
the sky through these trees, blue
that’s almost not blue; a bird’s egg
or as if colors were verbs–
I love how evocative this language is. It transports me completely to January in the Upper Midwest, and strangely enough that’s a place I like to be.
Travis Young, banjo picker for Blind Corn Liquor Pickers, a slamgrass outfit out of Lexington, KY was kind enough to write and inform us that the band’s second CD, Anywhere Else?, is now available.
The album was recoded under the tutelage of Nashville sound guru Bil Vorndick, best known for recording the likes of Allison Krauss, Bela Fleck, Acoustic Syndicate and Larry Keel.
If you visit the band’s online press kit, you can download three songs, including a jamgrass version of “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads.
New York Metro: Villard is paying an $80,000 advance to the creator of a religion designed to make fun of intelligent design. This summer, Bobby Henderson, 25, an unemployed slot-machine engineer, posted a much-forwarded open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education declaring that “there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design” on his Website. He contends that a huge, invisible beast made of spaghetti and meatballs created the world about 4,000 years ago (pasta of that vintage has been found in China, he points out). The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which will codify Pastafarianism, is set to come out on Valentine’s Day. “My hope is that readers won’t know if I’m trying to make a point about pseudoscience or if I’m a complete nut,” says Henderson. “I’ll be really disappointed if it doesn’t spawn a cult.”
[via Kottke]
USA Today: Entrepreneurship turned eBay founder Pierre Omidyar into one of the world’s richest men. Now, he’s betting it can ease one of the world’s most daunting problems: poverty.
Omidyar, who started eBay 10 years ago, will announce Friday that he is donating $100 million for a new Tufts University program to generate millions of tiny loans, some as small as $40, to finance entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in India, Bangladesh and other poor countries.
The gift is a big endorsement of social entrepreneurship — a field of growing interest for the new generation of technology entrepreneurs. The shift could recast traditional philanthropy dominated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation built on Old Economy wealth.
The microfinance industry began about 30 years ago in rural Bangladesh when economics professor Muhammad Yunus launched what is now Grameen Bank. It has 3.7 million borrowers, virtually all women, relying on the bank’s nearly 1,300 branches covering 46,000 villages. Repayment rates are 95% to 98%, says Grameen Foundation USA, the bank’s U.S. affiliate.
Since Grameen’s launch, a network of other microlenders — as many as 10,000 — has sprung up worldwide, lending about $24 billion annually, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign, funded partly by Omidyar. Over the next 10 years, he expects the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund could unleash $1 billion in loans, many to women, as capital is repaid, then lent again.
Omidyar, with $10 billion, ranks No. 18 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans.
According to Wired, the Stillwell Avenue station near Coney Island has been outfitted with solar in a massive renovation project.
Rather than drawing its power from traditional polycrystalline displays mounted on a flat roof, the Stillwell Avenue station gets its juice from 2,730 building-integrated PV panels, or BIPVs, built right into a curvilinear glass roof.
On a sunny day, 60,000 square feet of integrated solar paneling on its roof can generate 210 kilowatts of power, enough to meet two-thirds of the station’s energy requirements. The solar energy doesn’t run the trains, but is expected to contribute approximately 250,000 solar kilowatt hours per year to the station’s other energy needs — primarily lighting and air conditioning in the station and its attached offices and retail stores.
New York seems to be leading the way in adopting solar. In addition to the Stillwell station, photovoltaic, or PV, cells help power a bus terminal and rail yard in Queens, as well as the Whitehall Ferry Terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan.