more than 95 theses

biblioburro

Watch this video at Ayoka Productions

away for a bit

Gentle readers, I’ll be traveling for the next few days and will probably be unable to post. However, the occasional tweet may be forthcoming, so check out the Text Patterns Twitter widget to the…

how I discovered criticism

I’ve written elsewhere about my discovery of irony, but today I wish to remember my discovery of criticism.

rivers of narrative time

supernatural collective nouns

wisdom and old age

All I want to do here is to juxtapose two quotations. The first comes from Philip Greenspun’s blog:

What has the increasing pace of technological development done to old people in our age?

Let’s…

a set of complcated jigs

A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number — perhaps the majority — of the men and women who handle our…

making a dictionary

This is beautiful.

Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

introducing a Text Patterns recurrent feature: Charts!

I am fascinated by charts — more specifically, charts used to provide visual representations of complex ideas or sequences. They’re a variety of mind map, I guess, though they represent…

five books I've started but am a long way from finishing

I hate it when this happens. I really prefer reading one book at a time, but sometimes I get squirrelly.

ten books I really wish I had time to re-read

• Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato
• Gregory Dix, The Shape of the…

life imitates Text Patterns

In particular, my post the other day about the Kindle user trying a book for the first time. Marco Arment on the Kindle experience of his significant other:

Tiff plowed through more than 20…

"minority cult"

That’s how Alison Flood in the Guardian characterizes Philip Roth’s thoughts about the future of the novel. (The adjective is redundant, isn’t it? I mean, doesn’t “cult” — in that use of the term…

the Kindle user after trying his first "book"

… Look, I’m not saying there’s nothing good about it. That it’s just one book, so if you lose it you’re only out a few bucks, that’s nice. That you don’t have to worry about charging the…

escaping

It’s interesting that the NYT today ran one story about people who refuse to have cellphones and another story about people who want to escape being always connected to the Internet. This meme…