some jagged news: an extremely smart and accomplished young poet and scholar, kelly grovier - who writes all the time for the times literary supplement - has a book coming out on walking stewart: very much the kind of thing i was contemplating! it's quite typical: two centuries without a book on the guy; suddenly everyone's doing it. i am contemplating whether this pre-empts my project. this is the kind of thing that happens in the sciences all the time, but it can also happen in the humanities, though with very different inflections. one good thing: grovier is an excellent writer and an expert on british romanticism. stewart will very much get treated right. what i could possibly do better - or so i tell myself - is work stewart into the history of philosophy.
you know when i was doing a book on voltairine de cleyre - the great american feminist and anarchist, neglected since her death in 1912 - sharon presley contacted me to say she was doing a book too, so with some discomfort we collapsed our two projects into one. but when we published in 2004, eugenia delamotte's book came out almost simultaneously. and also brigati's reader. really these things make you think twice about zeitgeists.
