One of the references in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that eludes me (in its specificity, not in its generality) is the following quotation: A couple of critical pieces have dealt with this. Deborah Madsen, in the recent Cambridge Companion writes that Pynchon addresses Karl Marx to make the denial that colonies are just cheap labour.

In a recent piece for the LRB, Mattathias Schwartz gives an inside look at the truly scary world of carding, the practice of stealing credit card information, through a review of Mischa Glenny's new book DataMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia . The point that I want to quibble about (although perhaps it's not a quibble; language is important) is the use of the term "hacker" throughout.

Organized by Dr. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia, the Weird Council conference takes place from the 14th-15th September. Register now! Or you can download the poster as a PDF. Conference on China Miéville: Weird Council was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 03, 2012.

'Whose line is it anyway?: enlightenment, revolution, and ipseic ethics in the works of Thomas Pynchon', Textual Practice, 26, 5, pp. 921-939 Publication: 'Whose line is it anyway?: enlightenment, revolution, and ipseic ethics in the works of Thomas Pynchon', Textual Practice, 26, 5 was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 02, 2012.

I have just seen, via Rohan Maitzen on Twitter, a useful page of suggestions for the "first day of term", teaching-wise. This led me to re-think a few of the ways in which I think the web should work. I have been advocating, for quite a while now, the idea of re-decentralizing the web. This statement requires a bit of unpacking.

In the wake of the Finch report, one of the most frequent cries from academics, particularly at the early career phase, was one of despair. The endorsement of Gold OA meant, mostly to them, that they would have to budget for publication funds in their applications. In short, Gold meant gold; currency. This is, of course, not what the terminology means in the traditional Budapest initiative model.

Although I'm not universally convinced by claims of grade inflation (and have written about the examination system over at the Guardian ), I do welcome some attempt to differentiate examination grades. There is no point in having an examination system that yields a homogeneous result, or has boundaries that are overly broad. That said, the manner in which Gove has set about regulating this is abhorrent, for several reasons.

Although I'm nothing to do with the organization of this, I wanted to give it a plug!

I've been mightily impressed by the role of crowdfunding solutions in recent days. I think it's great that these projects allow initiatives to get off the ground via people who like what's being proposed. I was particularly interested, though, in app.net's approach. App.net, for those who don't know, is an attempt to re-make Twitter, but with open API access and no advertising.

At the risk of more meta, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on blogs in scholarly research. Sarah Quinnell recently wrote a post on the LSE impact blog, following up on her Guardian post that "[blogs are increasingly recognised as a legitimate academic output". I want to consider some of the problems here, but not from the perspective of content.

Last night, as I was heading to bed, a guy called Mark Kohut, whom I know from various Pynchon-interest intersections, published a copy of a letter he was planning to send to the New York Times.