…or almost any piece of writing, really: “In the age of…” [Oh, THAT age.] “We live in an age when…” [Of course we do.] “It’s hard to know what to make of [Title] by [Author]…” [It’s your job to make *something* of it.] (Filed under “Reminders to Self, or Things to Leave on the Editing-Room… Continue reading »
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Books in the Wild
This introduces a personal experiment in documenting how we interact with books. First, the context. Literary critics, book historians, publishing types, and cultural spectators and speculators have spent a lot of time of late kicking around “the book” as an idea and as a phenomenon: its past, its hybrid e-and-print present, whether it has a future… Continue reading »
This and That, or Where I’ve Been
I haven’t been anywhere, to tell you the truth, not in the real world anyway. What have I been doing? *I moderated a Google hangout on collaboration in scholarly publishing with several university-press directors. You can help make it go viral on YouTube (or just watch it–up to you). *Then I wrote a story… Continue reading »
Coding and “Computhors”
Is this internet killing books? What do poetry and software have in common? Can computers write literature? The Times Literary Supplement asked me to write about three books that take up those questions: The Edge of the Precipice: Why read literature in the digital age?, edited by Paul Socken; Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software,… Continue reading »
What I Did With My Summer Vacation
Bought a car, drove to Niagara Falls and wore disposable ponchos (see pic, left), drove to Canada, saw a moose and two black-bear cubs, went canoeing, saw some stars (celestial, not Hollywood), wrote a short story and a long review-essay, did some reading, and came back ready to tackle some big projects this fall. Hope… Continue reading »
