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
March 20, 2009
Via our faithful reader Tony Comstock I see this post commenting on this post reflecting on the Central European suicide rates and their relation to literacy. Dr Andrej Maruai, a Slovene psychiatrist involved in organizing the conference, presented a paper called "Suicide in Europe: Genetics, Literacy and Poverty" which...
March 19, 2009
Will Self on his writing practices: Self, who prefers to write his fiction on a typewriter, adds that his daily word count is lower than it used to be, "partly because I shifted to the Imperial Good Companion, which is a slower machine, about four or five years ago. Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You...
March 19, 2009
One of the really cool things about the Internet is that if you wait long enough someone else will say all the things you wanted to say and will thereby relieve you of the responsibility to say them. I suggested recently that I might have some comments about Clay Shirky’s essay on the present and future of newspapers, but I think...
March 18, 2009
For the last few years — and, I regret to say, only for the past few years — I’ve been keeping a record of the books I read, and I append a little “r” to the title if it’s one that I’ve read before. But lately I’ve begun to think that I need more categories. For instance, the other day I...
March 17, 2009
About ninety-five years ago, the American poet Erza Pound, then living in London, received the manuscript of an essay called “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” He was immediately and lastingly fascinated, and for most of the rest of his life would think of Chinese writing as the perfect union of word and...
March 16, 2009
Over at Book2, James Bridle reveals the book he made from his tweets: Turns out that 4100 tweets can produce a 270 page book. Bridle says that he did it primarily to test his InDesign skills and to find out how Lulu handles hardcovers. But isn't that what lorem ipsum is for? I don't know. It seems to me that tweets are...
March 14, 2009
Clark Shirky has written an exceptionally thought-provoking essay on the future of newspapers and what we can learn about it from remembering the first decades of the printing press. Here’s the opening: Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was...
March 13, 2009
In response to yesterday’s post on traditional and simplified Chinese characters, I got a really interesting email from my student Yee Sum Lo that I’d like (with her permission) to share: Chinese Input software is the same for both cell phones and computers: you can input a traditional character easily on a cell phone and...
March 12, 2009
Twice in the past few years I’ve had an interesting experience as a reader. The first encounter was with Marilynne Robinson’s celebrated Gilead. I read the book soon after it came out, and liked it very much — but was not especially moved by it or taken with it. But then, in the weeks that followed, certain scenes...
March 12, 2009
Here’s a fascinating post by James Fallows on a current debate in China about how to form the ideographic characters of the Chinese language. During Mao’s reign simplified forms of the traditional characters were introduced, but many people believe that the the simplified versions are not only less informative, but are also...