This one is free on the web:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The next two are accessible on campus by anyone, but from off campus you'll need to be sure to connect to them through our catalog and then use your name and student ID# to get in.

Routledge Reference Resource On-line: Politics and International Relations

Dictionary of the History of Ideas

These are in paper in the Reference collection in the Library:
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms PN81.E43 1993

Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory PN98.W64E53 1997

Additional Gems of the Library Catalog & Reference Page

Citation & Style Guides
Internet Guides
Peer-reviewed Journal definition

Journal Databases

Use journal articles for specific, in-depth analysis of your topic. Journal articles rarely provide overviews, except in the case of reviews of the literature of a field.

To get to these databases, do a title search in the libary catalog, just as you would for a book, then link to the database from the catalog record you find. Again, when working from off campus be sure to go through the library web page.

Genderwatch (Included in Proquest)--You'll want to check "peer reviewed journals" in order to avoid pages and pages of newspaper articles.
Wilson Web
Philosopher's Index
MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography (included in Ebscohost)
Westlaw
JSTOR

Communications and Mass Media Complete(also included in Ebscohost)

There are two major, scholarly music encyclopedias in the Reference collection which will provide in-depth overviews by scholars who are deeply informed about their topics:

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York : Grove's Dictionaries, 2001. 2nd ed. Location: Reference ML100 .N48 2001

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. New York : Garland Pub., 1998-
Location: Reference ML100.G16 1998

Browse the shelves in the M section of reference for more specific, shorter encyclopedias if you are studying, for example, a particular instrument, or musical genre.

Journal Databases

Following is a list of journal databases recommended for music and cultural studies. You may use the links below, or start at the Library Catalog and do a title search in the catalog, just as you would for a book. Be sure to go through the library web page to get into these databases when you are off campus, so your name and student ID # will get you in.

JSTOR--multidisciplinary, all full-text, very scholarly important journals, all the way back to the beginning. About 30 music journals are collected here.

IIMP (International Index to Music Periodicals)--this database covers both the popular magazines in the field of music and many scholarly journals. You'll have to check our catalog to find out if we have a subscription to the journals you want, and use the interlibrary loan system if not.

EHRAF collection of ethnography -- indexes book sources so that you can correlate cultural practices across different cultures--this is not a journal database. Great for studying specific groups IF they are covered (it's not complete).

Wilson Web--multi-disciplinary, higher level of scholarly focus than the next two-- you may select Humanities or Social Sciences

ProQuest--multidisciplinary, lots of full-text, a mix of news and scholarly sources--the Wal-Mart of databases, but very strong in the social sciences--includes EthnicNewswatch & GenderWatch (full-text coverage of the press and scholarly journals from ethnic and feminist publishers

EBSCOhost--like Proquest, but more of a Lowe's--good in science and humanities--includes the Modern Language Association International Bibliography which is the critically important in-depth index for literature and language studies.

JSTOR--multidisciplinary, all full-text, very scholarly important journals, all the way back to the beginning

HAPI online (Hispanic American Periodicals Index--covering the Americas--all disciplines)

EHRAF collection of ethnography -- indexes book sources so that you can correlate cultural practices across different cultures--this is not a journal database. Great for studying specific groups IF they are covered (it's not complete).

Historical abstracts--the indepth index for scholarly journals in history. A must-use for historians.

Bibliography of the History of Art -- this one is free on the web. Very strong on historical studies, weak on arts outside the traditional visual arts. Very thorough indexing.

IIMP (International Index to Music Periodicals)--this database covers both the popular magazines in the field of music and the scholarly journals.

Anyway, I was really excited to read this weekend that Firefox 2 will have spellcheck in all applications!!! I'm not sure if that means anything within blogs, but whatever it means, I am overjoyed.

Read this poem about mistakes, including mistakes with words: http://www.poems.com/ If you're reading the page after Nov. 7, search the backfiles for Nov. 7th and the poem "Bungle: A Survey."

And then the way Red develops an inside landscape when he loses his innocence, and how he works with that inner landscape through photography, a medium associated with distance, objectifying and the phallic (remember your lens cap, honey?). And what does that have to do with the blindness so common in Greek mythology and legend (Homer, Stesichorus, Oedipus).

And, and, and...

And also, how Stesichorus seems to have been a writer (in the difficult time between Homer and Stein) as opposed to Homer who was a performer--an oral poet. In oral cultures, the adjective HAD to stick with the same noun in order to support memorization. Little set phrases were used over and over so that the speaker could give them automatically while searching for the next element of the recitation. Writing freed the adjectives, because writing made memorization unnecessary. Now we have networked language and language with images, what can/will be unlatched? Sequential narrative, for one, and I think Carson works with that.

There's something here about being bracketed by the poetry and art which came before and the poetry and art to come. She has a very strong sense of the influences we all live within. Looking backward and forward toward Immortality.

Switch to the contemporary. Carson has created a monster, a "novel" which is made up of parts which are not usually linked: chatty introductions, Greek fragments, Stein, Dickinson (who also wrote poetry during those difficult centuries between Homer and Stein), logic lessons which devolve into nonsense language, and then a novel-length poem which is not poetic except in that lines are broken apart and there are lots more spaces than in prose, and finally, there is a partially nonsensical interview.

So, like Geryon's wings and creativity trying to break out, or like internet art flourishing in new, chaotic opportunities outside the strictures art critics or museums or galleries, and, most of all outside divisions of genre or formats, Carson's novel struggles to break out of previous forms and expectations.

Here are some of the puns and references I caught:

p. 14
"The red world And corresponding red breezes/ went on Geryon did not" "Went on" and "Geryon" rhyme, suggesting "Carry on," suggesting "carrion" (like, red meat, get it?).

p. 4 Note also that adjectives are defined as, among other things, appendages. Like wings and like the many appendixes in the text.

And, in general, lots of reminders of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the artist comes of age and into his art despite all the narrowness of his upbringing and home. His name is Stephen Daedalus (as in Daedalus the inventor who's son Icarus dies flying too close to the sun with the wings, which Daedalus invented, which were supposed to free them). More Greeks, more wings, more art, more inventors, more creativity, more flight from feeling a freak in one's own culture and taking wing through art.

And I can't forget the little red dog. Mean old Herakles, bringer of civilization, killer of little red dogs.

Ripples with the appearance of scales, without foam crests.

Small wavelets, still short, but more pronounced. Crests have a glassy appearance
and do not break.

Perhaps scattered white horses.

Small waves, becoming larger; fairly frequent white horses.
Moderate waves, taking a more pronounced long form; many white horses. Largee waves begin to form; the white foam crests are more extensive everywhere. Sea heaps up

and white foam from breaking waves begins to blow in streaks.

Waves of greater length; edges of crests begin to break into spindrift.

High waves. Dense streaks of foam.
Crests of waves begin to topple, tumble and roll over.

Very high waves with long over-hanging crests. Foam, in great patches, is blown
in dense white streaks. The whole surface of the sea takes on a white appearance.

The tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like.

Visibility affected.

Small and medium-size ships might be for a time lost to view behind the waves. The sea is completely covered with long white patches.
Everywhere the edges of the wave crests are blown into froth.

Visibility affected.

The air is filled with foam and spray. Sea completely white with
driving spray.

Visibility very seriously affected.

As for the reading:

Greene is Glazier redone for the arts, primarily the visual arts. Like Glazier she is interested in understanding, cataloging and validating new expressions in the new media. Most of us are more acquainted with innovative artistic expression than we are with innovative poetry, so the ideas don't seem so far-fetched as in Glazier, and there are many more examples from which to work. I expect most readers would have an easier time understanding the works Greene describes and collects as "art" when they wouldn't necessarily understand the works Glazier collects or describes as "poetry." Nevertheless, many of the same prejudices (or to put it more kindly "expectations") pertain. "That's not art!"

The most interesting part of her argument is how internet art "bypass[es] the autonomous status traditionally ascribed to art objects." (p. 10) In the same way that the body and the "I" are being redefined according to Downes, the art object disappears as internet art becomes interactive and fluid. Internet art becomes an action, just as Glazier's poetry became performance of instruction or codes. Identity of self, identity of other (object) are becoming SO-o-o 20th century.

Here are some of the links from her work that I found most interesting (or useful, as the case may be). They are definitely in the conceptual art category, a category which may be as unfamiliar to the general public as innovative poetry.

http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?5635
http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html

I do miss the economic arguments, as well as the aesthetic. I don't understand or accept his dodge in the introduction: "One dominant poetic of cyberspace has already been hinted at--the new media economy that threatens to shape reality into a Time-Warner-Microsoft World. While this theme will reappear throughout the book [rarely], it will not be developed as a distinct theme, because it relates to the technnology (the Internet) rather than the social processes of communication that are my object of analysis." How can he possibly claim that Time-Warner and Microsoft are not part of the social processes of communication? They have the loudest voices of all, reinforced by a steady stream of technoids ranting about the gear and what gear is better and why and how come you have to have the LATEST, biggest, best. The reality that is being created from that discourse is the reality that requires participation in a competitive model which says, basically--if don't stay current with the technology YOU WILL FALL BEHIND AND THEN YOU WILL DIE.

On the other hand, Downes would argue, I think. that because we are creating this new reality together, we don't have to accept the corporate media perspective. True, but the voices of the market are really loud and corporate media can't simply be left out of any serious discussion of the construction process.

The librarians of the story are small, insignificant little Faust/Ahabs--snared in the foolish pride which suggests that somehow we CAN apprehend the infinite. Leaving the sweet earth behind, they live whole lives, seeking, lost in a dessicated world of ever-receding, possibly ever-repeating rooms of texts, until they dry up and blow away. There are no women in the Library of Babel, and apparently no sex. Much has to be given up in order to seek mastery and knowledge.

Compare this story to that of the immortals in another Borges tale. A seeker wanders the earth looking for the land of immortality. Eventually he comes across a group of nearly immobile, animal-like lumps of humans. One, he eventually discovers, is an immortal Homer. With immortality, the opportunity to learn all languages, have all experiences, encompass all knowledge eventually leads to immobility--who cares? There is only more of the same. And nothing else lasts that is of this sweet earth.

And God created the great Whales, and each
Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously
The waters generated by their kinds,
And every bird of wing after his kind,
And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying,
'Be fruitful, multiply, and, in the seas,
And lakes, and running streams, the waters fill;
And let the fowl be multiplied on the earth!'
Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals
Of fish that, with their fins and shining scales,
Glide under the green wave in sculls that oft
Bank the mid-sea. Part, single or with mate,
Graze the sea-weed, their pasture, and through groves
Of coral stray, or, sporting with quick glance,
Shew to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold,
Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend
Moist nutriment, or under rocks their food
In jointed armour watch; on smooth the seal
And bended dolphins play; part, huge of bulk,
Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait,
Tempest the ocean. There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretched like a promontory, sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land, and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.

Milton

Speaking of which, I note that in the Daily Olympian this morning the Port of Olympia has received a grant for surveillance cameras. V for Vendetta, here we come!