December 2009
162 posts
2 tags
Dec 31st
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“To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of...”
– Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith and the endangerment of detailed, long-form stories
Dec 31st
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reading savagely
matthewbattles: Posted via email from savagereaders’s posterous | Comment »
Dec 30th
16 notes
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“On November 13, Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians,...”
–  How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow
Dec 30th
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“MAINSTREAM FICTION: The pretense that there is a group of readers who can be...”
– Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms
Dec 30th
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Night →
Dec 30th
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Dec 29th
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Dec 27th
The Dispossessed →
“I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the “Google settlement.” You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept…
Dec 26th
Amazon Kindle gets its DRM stripped (for the time... →
Dec 25th
1 tag
Dec 24th
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo... →
willw2: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs.
Dec 24th
“Many people think that each kind of animal has its own language – including...”
– Robert Arp and Tracie Mahaffey: ‘“And They Have A Plan”: Cylons As Persons‘ in: Jason T. Eberl (Ed.): Battlestar Galactica and philosophy: knowledge here begins out there (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
Dec 24th
34 notes
WatchWatch
roomthily: James Geary, metaphorically speaking via TED six metaphors a minute
Dec 24th
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Dec 24th
Dec 24th
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see...”
– Don Delillo (via bookncoffee) (via booklover)
Dec 24th
54 notes
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Orson Welles and His Brief Passionate Betacam Love... →
Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
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Dec 23rd
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Top Ten Literary Feuds of the Aughts: A Special... →
Dec 23rd
Dec 22nd
Dec 22nd
Dec 22nd
18 notes
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Some structural problems with collecting →
bobulate: Charles Holland on collecting: In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin described the act of collecting as one that gives life to objects, creating a frame for them to exist. “The acquisition of an old book”, he wrote, “is its rebirth”. Outside the collection objects have no meaning or, perhaps, only their everyday, quotidian meaning. We need the collection, Benjamin...
Dec 22nd
Dec 21st
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Book Review: "The Original of Laura" →
Before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his wife, Vera, to burn the unfinished draft of a novel called “The Original of Laura”—a handwritten mélange of notes on 138 index cards. Vera ignored the instruction. Instead, she temporized for 16 years about whether to publish the book in its incomplete form, and never did. When she died in 1991, the cards were still locked in a...
Dec 21st
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Dec 21st
Dec 21st
Dec 21st
Dec 21st
14 notes
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Dec 21st
3 tags
WatchWatch
Mathias Svalina’s The Hospital
Dec 21st
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Dec 20th
1 tag
Dec 20th
Notes To An Art Maker & Marketeer, part I →
Community is important, but so is dissemination. Magic will always reside in the product. As the ignorant become less so, look for new ways to hide process. ‘Industry standard’ means broken. …
Dec 20th
3 tags
WatchWatch
This is as amazing as his presentations on copyright reform and free culture, but the issue is bigger. Take a minute and watch this. Some of the finest work from one of the world’s finest minds
Dec 20th
3 tags
WatchWatch
On the Transliteracy.com website, Sue Thomas writes that she had challenged students with computer science backgrounds to memorise a few stanzas of Keats. She was “very surprised when, a few days later, Dave Soden, one of those students, sent me this link. He had set La Belle Dame Sans Merci to music and performed it himself with a guitar accompaniment. The result? This haunting and...
Dec 20th
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ListenA Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka “A Hunger...
Dec 20th
Dec 20th
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More about the Hammer UCLA exhibition of R. Crumb’s Genesis.
Dec 19th
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WatchWatch
Gallerist Paul Morris discusses the exhibition of R. Crumb’s work The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis at the Hammer museum.
Dec 19th
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Dec 19th
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Dec 19th
Satyricon by Petronius →
Nicholas Lezard’s choice We need regular retranslations of the Satyricon, for two significant reasons: the first is that worthy approximations of the original racy, slangy, deceptively…
Dec 19th
Random House Declares Ownership of All Ebook... →
There is a clanking noise upstairs in the playroom. We look away from our cocktails and conversation and exchange worried glances. What could be the matter? A lover’s quarrel? A drunken brawl between…
Dec 19th
“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the... →
Dec 19th
Video: Terry Pratchett on religion: 'I'd rather be... →
At the Guardian Book Club, bestselling author Terry Pratchett gives his views on science and religion John Mullan Andy Gallagher
Dec 19th
Scientists Uncover Literary Fingerprints →
A group of Swedish physicists, writing in The New Journal of Physics, contend that they can identify individual authors based on a unique “literary fingerprint” of word use. (My…
Dec 19th