I confess this week's post snuck up on me. So, with no particularly good excuse I post today a rerun of a piece that got some good comments the first time around, “Support our Truths”:

The thing about Paris is, you're always running into the ghost of someone famous. I'm sure Paul Valéry stayed in lots of houses in his time, but come around a street corner, look up, see this sign and it's like Paris is actually someplace like, well, Paris, where simply everyone you've heard of — and some folks you haven't — did the things that are the reasons you've heard of them. On Wednesday of last week I walked by a group of screaming French kids (or, as I like to call them, Freedom kids) who had just watched Beyoncé walk into a store on the Champs-Elysées. Between Beyoncé and Valéry, France has you covered.

I never liked the term World Music. As an adjective, “world” seems to carry a false pretension to greater warmth and caring than its more neutral predecessor “international” did. Also I suspect some condescension and unexamined exoticism lurks in the phrase. In the literal sense all music is from the world, of course, so really what one is saying is “from the rest of the world,” an emphasis that implies place of origin is either all this has going for it or all it needs. And, as long as we're on the subject, is there ever anything good in those bins? Any major style like Ska gets promoted to its own heading, making World Music largely a catch-all for leftovers.

Steven Meisel (the fashion photographer responsible for, among other things, Madonna’s book Sex) has a spread in the September issue of Italian Vogue called “State of Emergency.” If you don’t get Italian Vogue, you can see scans of the images here or watch a slideshow of the pictures put together by Vogue.

One of the pleasures of writing for the digital pages of printculture is the chance to see the ways in which our contributions often find connections to each other. A link is more fun than a footnote, and having the chance to sidestep over to the other text for either a quick reminder or a parallel reading makes me recall with a revised fondness those people who, ten years ago, insisted hypertext would change the way we write. Touche.

1. When I got my first academic job, my initiation into the working world was standard: go in for a short talk with the department chair, pick up keys and a code for the copy machine from the department secretary, attend a workshop on sexual harassment. Twenty or thirty of us new appointees sat in an auditorium to be lectured about the don’ts and don’ts. (I don’t remember any do’s.) It was 1990, and that area of law was largely unsettled.

So, the third season of Project Runway is rapidly coming to a close. Tonight, we find out which of the remaining designers will be going on to Fashion Week. (Unless, like me, you happened to read the New York Times article that mentioned the finalists, without so much as a spoiler alert.) Of course, like all reality shows of this ilk, people complain that the quality has declined even as everyone remains fairly addicted to watching it.

At the risk of sounding like one of them there deconstructionists: in order to be like 9/11 the next 9/11 cannot be like 9/11. What has become essential about 9/11 is not the facts of what happened, as terrible as these are, but the shock and awe of them. A repetition, in other words, wouldn’t do. Partly as a belated comment on last week’s excellent pieces by E Wesp and S Shirazi, I float a diagnosis of the meaning of terror five years and change after the day “everything changed.”

I admit it! I’ve never studied abroad, I’ve never backpacked, I’ve never field-tripped, I’ve never, ever, been to Europe. I’ve been to Mexico more times than I can count, which seems to be, interestingly enough, neither where I come from nor where I’m currently living, considered “international travel” when people are trading stories. Get this: I don’t even have a passport.

Josh Marshall wrote a short piece today about his reaction to reading a Washington Post article on how the Bush administration “screened political appointees for jobs in post-invasion Iraq based on loyalty to Bush and the conservative agenda.” As Marshall points out, at some level this is completely unsurprising: anyone who's been paying attention already suspected (or, really, knew) this was true in general, and is probably outraged enough about the Bush Administration that this will just be one more matchstick on the pile.

Like everyone I was frightened and stunned after the attacks. I was scared to say anything and told myself it might make sense to wait and see what unfolded before trying to come to any conclusions. I also didn't want to say anything until I felt I could say everything, until I could speak my mind fully. And like most I soon fell under the influence of those at the top who were not stunned for long and who seized the chance to wage a deliberate campaign of intimidation against their domestic rivals.

One of the many, minor things I did with my Printculture vacation was to switch back to Netflix from Blockbuster and to watch a lot of movies. As a result, I rediscovered my aversion to Lars von Trier, managed to get disc 2 of Rome before the arrival of disc 3, and finally saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man ... this last, not long before the strange death of Steve Irwin and S. L. Kim’s sidebar noting the curious parallels between Irwin and Herzog’s subject Timothy Treadwell.

My vacation from printculture was largely uneventful, though I’ve had the chance to think back to a notable moment not long before our hiatus – namely the first veto of President Bush the younger. The political climate being what it’s been over the past 5 years, the lack of vetoes in itself really doesn’t seem like that much of a story, or if it is, it’s the story of congress rather than the no-veto president.

What I did on my Printculture vacation—pack books, prepare for moving van, repaint house for new tenants, clean out basement, unload truck, unpack books, weed garden, mow lawn—and all through, think about the things I wasn’t doing: teaching and writing. Like a T-shirted St. Francis, I lectured to the crickets and blackbirds and packing boxes, on: narratology, Faulkner, St. Bartholomew’s Day, rational choice theory, electronic publishing, terza rima, Serge Gainsbourg, Valerie Plame, Katrina,

One of the things I did on my printculture vacation (to follow E Hayot’s lead) is get my mom on a Medicare prescription drug plan. She turned 65 earlier this week, and my goal was to have the plan in place before her insurance plan expired and her Medicare coverage began. I’ve been dreading the prospect of wading through the paperwork for over a year, and all the media coverage about the proposed drug coverage, the “donut hole,” and the discount cards that seniors could use in the interim only compounded the sense of bureaucratic nightmare. My way of dealing with it was to ignore it as much as possible.

While I am not a huge advocate, I do occasionally listen to Air America radio. Many of the shows are bit ranty, the one worth checking out is Al Franken’s, which can involve fairly extended discussions with lefty (but not far lefty) pundits and major bloggers. One of the things that is really unpleasant about listening to the station is the same thing that is unpleasant about listen to any radio station, namely the ads.

The Artic Monkeys showed up in the news today in a place I didn't expect to see them. Again.

I had just been talking to EH recently about how the search-and-sort practices of search-engine edited news sites (that I believe he's discussed on printculture before) landed the Artic Monkeys, after the release of their first single, under “Pet/Animal News” on the YahooScienceNews page that I skim most mornings. Today, it happened again.

1. Visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. In his book on the museum, Lawrence Weschler quotes Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum in New York, about MJT director David Wilson: “He never breaks irony — that's one of the incredible things about him.” Indeed, if the museum is about anything, it is about the slightly disturbing totality of its performance, what amounts to an expression of an absolutely unshaken faith in the epistemological and political principles that ground it.