All Astir

All Astir A s this issue of Leviathan goes to press, we eagerly anticipate the Society’s Eighth International Conference, “Melville and Rome: Empire—Democracy—Belief—Art,” which will be held at the University of Rome and the Center for American Studies. More than one hundred scholars from over twenty nations will be participating. Dennis Berthold, Gordon Poole, and Leslie Marmon Silko are the keynote speakers. We will report on the conference in our March 2012 issue. Plans are coalescing for the next international Society conference, “Melville and Whitman,” to be held in June 2013 in Washington, D. C. This gathering will focus on the Civil War experiences of the two writers, while also inviting presentations on a range of other topics. The conference comes at the midpoint of the Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations taking place between 2011 and 2015. The Melville Society’s associate secretary Joseph Fruscione, Tyler Hoffman (Rutgers-Camden University), Martin Murray (founder of the Washington Friends of Walt Whitman), and Melville Society Cultural Project co-chair Christopher Sten are organizing the events, and they will issue a call for papers soon. Leading up to the Washington conference, Fruscione and Hoffman, along with Elizabeth Petrino of the Emily Dickinson Society, will be presiding over a conversation by distinguished scholars on a panel at the 2012 MLA conference in Seattle, titled “New Approaches to Civil War Poetry: Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville.” The next development meeting for the Melville Electronic Library (MELCamp3 ) will take place on October 13–15 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Cosponsored by HyperStudio, the digital humanities lab for Comparative Media Studies at MIT, the program’s opening night, open to the public, will be keynoted by MEL director John Bryant who will speak on “Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human.” The following day’s focus will be on new developments in TextLab and HyperStudio’s plans for “Melville Remix,” a digital workspace conceived by associate director Wyn Kelley in which readers, students, scholars, and editors may view and manipulate literary texts with their sources and adaptations in different media. Bryant visited MIT last fall to discuss developing this project. HyperStudio’s experience in designing humanities programs for the MIT classroom gives them expertise in many forms of digital visualization, especially timelines and mapping, that would be useful to MEL. Having the meeting at MIT will allow MEL and HyperStudio to plan for the future and learn from each other’s work. Readers c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 158 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S A L L A S T I R of Leviathan are invited to visit the MEL website (at http://mel.hofstra.edu) for further updates. We would be remiss in failing to report the momentous news that Herman Melville is now a Hall of Famer, at least in the state of New York. Each year (beginning in 2010) the Empire State Center for the Book at the New York Library Association holds its Book Festival Gala and Writers Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. This year, on April 1, 2011 (not a joke), Book Festival Committee chair Rocco Staino greeted several hundred attendees at The State Room in Albany, NY, only a few blocks from Melville’s school The Albany Academy and his uncle Peter’s bank. After a banquet, nine new members were admitted. Among the living authors were children’s writer Paula Fox and poet John Ashbery (who confided to one attendee that he was currently re-reading Moby-Dick). New York’s other new inductees were Willa Cather, Julia DeBurgos, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Madeleine L’Engle, Dorothy Parker, and Herman Melville. Melville’s great-great-grandson Peter Whittemore and Leviathan editor John Bryant accepted the honor on behalf of The Melville Society and readers worldwide. Epic snows prevented Melville Society president Wyn Kelley and Executive Secretary Mary K. Bercaw Edwards from attending the ceremony. While the April First celebration, evoking the occasion of The Confidence-Man, might give readers pause, you should...