To Hell Without the Dignity of a Handbasket, Even

In today's Daily Californian , page 1, we learn that "Dr. Jane Goodall, despite having worked with chimpanzees in Tanzania for much of her life, still speaks with a soft British accent." This is local color, very nice, but why "still"? Is a soft British accent matter for surprise in an Englishwoman resident for a long time in a former British colony where the official language is English? I can't fathom what sort of accent the journalist was expecting Dr. Goodall to sport. Can it be that, "having worked with chimpanzees in Tanzania for much of her life," she is expected to speak with -- a soft chimpanzee accent? On the back page we have, naturally, Cal's big loss to USC this weekend. My interest in sports is limited entirely to a morbid fascination with post-game interviews, and my attention was captured by quarterback Kevin Riley's explanation of what went wrong: "It's just something you've got to do to win games is put the b...

Who "edits" popular music? I don't mean the preparation of musical scores, but the editing that happens to the popular music we hear, whenever that music is reissued, on compact disc or as a digital file; editing that is done by the commercial entities that have the legal right to issue those recordings. And I also don't mean what an artist or a recording engineer might mean by "editing" -- that is, "shortening" the recording. I am suggesting a parallel between critically editing classic literature and the reissuing of music that originally appeared in a different format. This kind of editing is typically done silently and is under-theorized; while the editing of literary texts is at least sometimes done "transparently" and has a large and contentious body of theorizing behind it. Recordings are not exactly texts (whatever texts are!); but I think the remastering and reissuing of recordings is editing, in the literary-critical sense: all...