Things Noted Here and There

News: Congratulations to our colleague, KC Johnson, who has been chosen to hold the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv for the 2007-08 academic year. Congratulations also to Richard Byrne of the Chronicle of Higher Education, whose one act play,"Burn Your Bookes", has won the First Annual Prague Post Playwriting Festival.

The play is set in Prague in the Renaissance court of Emperor Rudolph II. Two alchemical pretenders are under sentence of death by starvation, where they engage in a desperate battle of wits and deception with the noted English alchemist Edward Kelley.

Thanks to Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado's Board of Regents has dramatically reduced the time required to fire a tenured professor. Still on paid administrative leave at $96,000 a year, Churchill is awaiting a report on his final hearing to CU President Hank Brown. Hat tip to Margaret Soltan at University Diaries. See: Hank Brown,"Tenure Reform: The Time Has Come," Inside Higher Ed, 26 March.

Excerpts:"Cultural Amnesia: Clive James' 20th Century Canon," Slate, 5 February-23 March, features selected sketches from James' new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.
Ricardo Alarcón,"Waiting for C. Wright Mills," The Nation, 23 March, remembers the American sociologist who supported Cuba's revolution.

Reviews: Martin Sieff,"On War It's Not," American Conservative, 12 March, reviews Max Boot's War Made New: War, Technology, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today. If Sieff's review appeared in a journal of the left, it might go unnoticed, but his demolition of Boot's book may be read by those who most need to read it. Hat tip.
Edward Rothstein,"The Spanish Civil War: Black and White in a Murky, Ambiguous World," NY Times, 24 March, reviews a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York,"Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War".
Clive James,"Reich Star," NY Times, 25 March, reviews Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl and Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life.
Matthew Price,"A Tribe of His Own," Bookforum, April/May, reviews Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography. Hat tip.