Additionally Noted ...
Tagged: This meme spreads like the plague on the net. It just keeps going – like a chain letter or a ponzi scheme -- except that they eventually collapse and it's not illegal. Serious people like Chris Brooke, David Beito, Adam Kotsko, and a Gauche pass it on and a Gauche tags me:
1) Total number of books I've owned: Thousands, undoubtedly. Like most academics, I find it easier to keep track of the number that I've actually published, which is six, with #7 in extended labor.
2) The last book I bought: I think it would be Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Knopf, 2004).
3) The last book I read: It's a tie, actually, between Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004) in fiction and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004) in non-fiction.
4) Five books that mean a lot to me (no particular order): Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes, John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.
5) People to tag: In case this is a chain letter or a ponzi scheme, Hiram Hover, David Noon, Profblogger, Red Ted, and Lisa Roy Vox should send their checks to me asap. Please do not sign them with pseudonyms.
Watergate: Frank Rich,"Don't Follow the Money," New York Times, 12 June. So, you thought that Deep Throat said"Follow the Money"? Well, no he didn't. But no matter, says Rich, we've fantasy versions of Watergate enough and the current administration is spinning new fantasies more openly than anything the Nixon administration might have imagined doing.