Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
October 2, 2009
For the past couple of years I have been working on the most challenging — and maybe the most fascinating — project of my scholarly life: a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s immensely difficult long poem The Age of Anxiety. A few years ago Princeton University Press published Arthur Kirsch’s critical edition of the same poet’s...
October 2, 2009
In 1957, when he was 69 years old, T. S. Eliot married 32-year-old Valerie Fletcher. When he died in 1965 she took charge of his literary estate and has controlled it ever since, with — from the scholar’s point of view — uneven results. When Peter Ackroyd was writing his biography of Eliot — which eventually appeared in 1984 —...
September 30, 2009
One of the fun — but also challenging — aspects of teaching at a liberal-arts college is that over the years you end up teaching many different courses. Which means that you end up reading many different books. So after having taught many surveys of the major Western traditions in literature, plus courses in classical literature,...
September 29, 2009
Joseph Addison, from the Tatler, on “the Critic” (1710): This, in the common Acceptation of the Word, is one that, without entering into the Sense and Soul of an Author, has a few general rules, which, like mechanical Instruments, he applies to the Works of Every Writer, and as they quadrate with them, pronounces the author perfect...
September 28, 2009
Speaking of being Against Social, let me comment on this post from the publisher of Seven Stories Press: One reason that we’re beginning our push to blur the lines between print and electronic publishing with Hwang Sok-yong, however, has to do with Mr. Hwang’s reputation as a pioneer in popularizing online fiction in Korea. Mr. Hwang...
September 28, 2009
Some good ideas from Mike Elgan, except for number 4 — I am so sick of “social” I could barf: 1. Bundled multimedia books. Work to make the default “version” of every book, the “everything version.” For about $10 more than the hardcover price, we should get the hardcover, eBook and audio versions together.2....
September 25, 2009
Says Brad Stone: “What Amazon could do . . . is release a software development kit and open up the Kindle to third-party applications, turning a device with a single purpose — reading — into something that is conceivably much more flexible.”Well, Amazon could do that — and the result would be a really, really bad imitation of a...
September 23, 2009
Terence Kealey writes, “The great academic novel of the 19th century was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The great academic novel of the 20th century was Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. Both books chronicle lust between male scholars and female acolytes. . . .” So, never quite got around to reading Middlemarch,...
September 21, 2009
Friends, I have a very full few days ahead, so there probably won’t be any posts. However, I’ll manage the occasional tweet-with-linkage, so keep an eye on the space to the right. (Now there’s a sentence that wouldn’t have been imaginable a few years ago.)
September 18, 2009
I enjoy beautiful book covers: I present images of them sometimes on my tumblelog, and I subscribe to the RSS feed for the delightful Book Cover Archive. But we — I — should keep in mind this thought from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who meditates on books she owns but hasn’t read: Others were just too gorgeously packaged to resist....