“Stilgoe conducts research on subjects ranging from catoptromancy and catoptrics, surviving marine disaster, nineteenth-century mechanistic stress, crossroads, and the future of cybernetic-free gores: each topic forms the core of a book in press or in progress.”

Cybernetic-free gores? Is that a new kind of presidential candidate? My favorite quote from the site, sent to me by a reader, and adorned by a picture of Stilgoe looking like Indiana Jones, is the following:

“Right now I work on several projects. One involves the growing interfaces among fantasy, advertising, and cyber-space rendering of real and surreal environments: lately I focus on fantasy illustration from the 1885 to 1910 period, the illusions wrought by moonlight on Romantic-era observers north of latitude 45, the fast-changing imaging of powerful, healthy women in challenging environments, and the growing inability of even well-educated people to look acutely at altered images of humans, humanoids, and animals and notice they are altered… The next project is around a bend in a salt creek. Anyone seen a grue?”

Larry Summers, get this guy in for an ‘interview.’ Seriously, I think we have a new contest here, don’t you? Poseur Alert invites submissions of the most pretentious, egomaniacal, loopy websites from various scholars in this nation’s great universities. Special attention will be given to those who can’t spell and whose pretentiousness is up there with, say, Cornel West.