August 2010
Feeney on the Jest →
Over at The American Scene, my blog-colleague Matt Feeney makes a case for Infinite Jest not unlike the one made in the comments on an earlier post here. Read and digest.
issue maps →
Via Scott McCloud. At least one of his examples shows how horribly these can be used to caricature arguments, but hey, that’s how it goes. Along these lines, I really like the visual…
ways of jesting →
When it first became common for college students to write on computers, researchers noticed some changes in the quality of their writing. (I think I read about this first in Michael Heim’s 1989 book…
iron sharpens iron →
There’s been a lot of talk in my Twitter feed and elsewhere online about this NYT story on open-access online peer review of literary scholarship. For me, this model marks an obviously significant…
jest the third →
Episode 12 of Ulysses is called “Cyclops,” and in the schematic outline of the book that Joyce produced for a few friends the “technic” (technique) of the episode is identified as gigantism….
private magazines →
We’ve noted before that when you’re reading an e-reader in public, no one knows what you’re reading — it could be porn or Proust. (Well, for some people Proust is porn, in a way.) Thus reading in…
what should my bookshelf be made of? →
Via.
gestures →
Gestures from João Machado on Vimeo.
Via swissmiss (in the comments to an earlier post), what we do with our hands when we read books.
alphabet of extinct mammals →
Click on the image for a much larger version. More about this book here.
jest the second →
So, in footnote 304 — ten thousand words or so ostensibly devoted to a history of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents — we get a beautifully and truly prophetic account of online plagiarism, a …
boredom →
“The Case for Boredom” isn’t really a case for boredom as such, but for pauses — for moments, especially in the lives of young people, when external stimuli cease long enough for some actual…
jest the first →
I really think Infinite Jest ought to be discussed as a novel, rather than a prophecy, but there’s no way of avoiding some acknowledgement of the latter element. Jason Kottke posted recently about…
infinite gestures →
Yeah, I know everybody read Infinite Jest last summer, but I didn’t. I had a book to write. Also this summer. So I am finally getting around to it, but have been somewhat comically delayed by…
poetry on page and screen →
Here’s a really thoughtful post by Siobhan Phillips on the highly fraught relationship between e-readers and verse. Phillips wants to argue that poetry’s concern with lineation and space…
freelancing →
Via this post by Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket, or rather the comments thereupon, I found this story about life as a freelance writer. It made my blood run cold, not because I’ve been in that…
The Age of Anxiety →
I can’t disguise how pleased I am with this. The whole project has been exciting and gratifying, but I wasn’t prepared for how moved I would be to see my name on the same page as…
normal science vs. chaos →
When the wonderful literary critic Tony Tanner died twelve years ago, Colin McCabe wrote an obituary containing these lines: The degree he undertook at Cambridge was largely the product of a…
light posting alert →
Thanks to travel and the like I’ll not be very active on this site for the next ten days or so. Don’t think that my affection has diminished.
advice from Jaron Lanier →
Several times in recent posts and comments I’ve mentioned Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget. It’s wildly uneven, a product of too many overlapping and non-overlapping interests, but there’s…
plagiarists' excuses →
This is a reasonably good story about plagiarism, covering the usual theories about How Social Media Are Changing Our Kids, but offering some rebuttals as well. But there’s one point that always…
