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
January 12, 2017
It’s been said — I wish I knew who said it first — that fantasy is always about disenchantment, about the draining of magic from the world. Certainly disenchantment is one of Pynchon’s obsessions, and the fantastic elements of his stories tend to emphasize loss. There’s a moment late in Mason & Dixon, when our heroes are...
January 9, 2017
In my previous post I explored some of the biological contexts of the idea of morphosis, form-changing, in Pynchon’s work. But I also hinted at the moral, the theological, and the literary-imaginative uses of the immensely rich concept of form. In light of all this it’s worth noting that by general consent the most remarkable...
January 9, 2017
Here’s a passage from my review of Adam Roberts’s edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: As the culmination of the long repudiation of [David] Hartley’s thought, Coleridge famously opposes this Imagination (later divided into Primary and Secondary) to the “Fancy,” which “has no other counters to play with, but...
January 4, 2017
Stories like this one by Frank Furedi are ubiquitous these days. It’s a refrain sung by many: Back in 2003, Neil Howe and William Strauss, the authors of the study Millennials Go to College, advanced the thesis that this generation is far less mature and resilient than previous ones. They noted that the millennial generation is far...
January 3, 2017
Apologies, friends — I had to delete this post. Too much material that’s really central to the book-in-progress. I’ll figure all this one one of these days.
December 30, 2016
Well … I know I said I was going to stop blogging my way through Pynchon, but I am grateful for the comments I’ve been getting (both on this blog and via email) — they really help me to think through these issues. So I need to find a way to keep getting those benefits without, as an editor put it to me the other day,...
December 30, 2016
Two thoughts about children and culture, prompted by a re-reading — or rather, if I’m honest, my first really thorough reading — of Iona and Peter Opie’s classic The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (hereafter LLS): 1) A few days ago I experienced a wonderfully bizarre moment of readerly serendipity: I was reading Pynchon’s...
December 28, 2016
On Twitter, Ross Douthat tells me that in Hail, Caesar! — a movie I dearly love — “The studio is the church, a corporate entity w/cosmic purpose that polices morals for everyone’s own good…. With its own necessary hierarchies, its place for everyone, its direct line to God (the invisible studio boss), etc.” and that therefore...
December 28, 2016
(the other two I’m reading digitally) Reading Pynchon — especially in the large quantities I am ingesting this holiday season — is a peculiar experience for this long-time lover of fiction, because, I find, I don’t know whether Pynchon writes good novels. Indeed, it’s not obvious that he writes novels at all. I do...
December 27, 2016
Last year I wrote a “my year in tech” post, so why not this year also? It’s been a one-step-forward one-step-back kind of year. Some of the changes I implemented last year have stuck this year, but not all of them. 1) The big difficulty of this past year was Twitter, thanks almost wholly to the Presidential election. As I...