Free Beauty, Boxes of Books, and Austerity: Three Updates from North Dakota Quarterly

This week, I spent a ton of time doing North Dakota Quarterly stuff.

The most fun NDQ project was perhaps the easiest. This morning I posted a link to a free book by our new art editor Ryan Stander called Wayside Sacraments. Check it out here and download it for free!

Less fun was the approximately 20 hours spent over the last two weeks putting North Dakota Quarterly volumes in boxes so that they could be moved from our existing storerooms to new storage in various places across campus. While the work was tedious and largely unrewarding, I did find myself leafing through the table of contents for many of the issues and stumbled upon a few remarkable gems.

Among my favorites was Maxwell Anderson’s senior play which though penned in 1911, it was not published until 1957. Titled Masque of the Pedagogues: Being a Dream of President McVey, it offers witty perspective on turn of the century life on the UND campus from the perspective of a student. Predictably, it features such fan favorites as O.G. Libby, A.G. Leonard (who famously recognized the potential for oil in Western ND), George Abbot, Wallace Stern (a Near Easternologist), and James Boyle (an early student of Gillette who goes on to Cornell), oh, and Satan. 

Finally, hanging out in the NDQ storerooms gave me time to think about our upcoming spring issue on humanities in the age of austerity. I’ve been carrying around (well, digitally) a copy of Mark Byth’s new(ish) book on austerity, but I’ve also been thinking about how to link the crazy quilt of ideas dumped here on my blog into something coherent. Part of me wants to do a series of rather disconnected “observations” that range from my overused “Billboard vs. Factory” (combining posts from here, here, and here) to something on branding in the humanities (like here and here), neoliberalism and competition in academia, and collaborative publishing.

I have some work to do before the February deadline!