Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. The Adorno Reader. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–111. Print.

I'm pleased to say that my patch to add a CLOCKSS manifest to OJS' LOCKSS page has been merged! This means that anybody who wants to sign up to be archived by CLOCKSS -- which is a subscription-based, geographically distributed dark archive -- will no longer have to modify the OJS manifest to be included.

It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the implementation phase is now hastily underway. No longer can Open Access be seen as a minority issue; it's here and it's here to stay. As one struggle ends, another begins though, like a grim phoenix rising from the ashes.

A quick note to say that David Letzler has very kindly submitted a review of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas that is now live in Orbit 1.2. New Orbit review: American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on October 21, 2012.

I'm pleased to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon today launched into its second issue. If you visit the journal at present, you may think that the issue is very small -- and you'd be correct. The journal has now moved to a rolling format, however. Articles will be added as and when they pass peer-review, copy-editing, typesetting and proofreading, rather than waiting until a whole batch have all been through this process.

In my quest to create a set of free and open tools for platinum, scholar-run OA journals, I've just committed a crude, provisional script to my meXml git repository that assists with typesetting into pseudo-NLM format. A few notes. First of all, what does it do? The script parses markup output from the wysihtml5 tool and converts it into near-as-damnit the format I need for typesetting.

'Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History', Textual Practice, 26, 5, pp. 973-978 A review of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History and Simon de Bourcier's Pynchon and Relativity . You can read the piece over at Textual Practice or you can view a preprint. Publication: 'Thomas Pynchon &

Today, the Guardian published the following 140-character short story by Jeffrey Archer. This evening, I have sent the following to the Guardian books editor. I would like to note that Jeffrey Archer, although a convicted perjurer, is also a litigious being.

Let me start by stating upfront how much I wanted to dislike this book. I caution students against biographical readings all the time. The author on whom I've done most of my research work, Thomas Pynchon, deliberately obfuscates attempts to read in this way through extreme privacy. I didn't like Max's style from the off (the dropping of the preposition after the verb "write" in its epistolary sense is an Americanism that I still can't forgive).

There is a proud tradition in many fields of the humanities of critical thinking. Linked to the Enlightenment Humanist tradition, this critique achieves its positivity (better citizens, better societies) through negation: we criticize and think critically because only in negating those wrong aspects of the world can we hope to put things aright.