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
December 14, 2016
Picking up where we left off: In the scenes we looked at last time, we saw certain structurally similar ideas being raised, that common structure being the V-shape as signifying both convergence and divergence. And so far we have been especially attentive to the divergence of mirrored time-frames, and the convergence of the animate and...
December 12, 2016
Just a quick post here to note that this ongoing orgy of Pynchoniana will be neither systematic nor scholarly, but rather impulsive and haphazard. I am reading Pynchon with a particular set of concerns in mind, and don’t feel obliged to be either fair or balanced, though I do hope to be unafraid. A few weeks ago I confessed to my...
December 12, 2016
In the first pages of V. Benny Profane falls in love with Rachel Owlglass, who at that point in the story seems to love only her MG (an inanimate object). Because he, as schlemihl, cannot get along with inanimate objects, he doesn’t drive. Later in the book, after having lost touch with Rachel, he sits on a bench in what appears to be...
December 9, 2016
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve spent a good bit of time over the past couple of years thinking about what I call the technological history of modernity. I have also suggested that one of the key figures in understanding this history is Thomas Pynchon. So as I begin to ask myself more seriously whether I want to...
December 9, 2016
I wrote recently that I see world-building in SF and fantasy as coming in two chief varieties, the speculative and the meticulous, and that those varieties offer different kinds of literary interest and pleasure. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea falls on the speculative end of the spectrum, Tolkien on the meticulous end. Here’s another...
December 8, 2016
For many Decembers now I have looked forward with great anticipation to John Wilson’s list of his favorite books of the previous twelve months — I always find fascinating items I never would have come across on my own. Alas, John will no longer be issuing his list from his customary perch as editor of Books and Culture,...
December 7, 2016
Laity Lodge is a retreat center in the Hill Country of Texas, and I just had the enormously rewarding privilege of spending a week of solitary writing there. (More solitary than would be the norm, because it’s closed for renovation — I was staying in a house near the edge of the property.) Laity Lodge is situated just below...
December 5, 2016
I’ve recently re-read Ursula Le Guin’s most famous novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) — the former for the first time in, yeeesh, I don’t want to think about how long. The latter, which has always been my favorite among her novels, revealed some structural flaws this time around: I really don’t...
December 3, 2016
This started as a reply to a comment Adam made on my previous post. But then it underwent gigantism. Adam, I see these matters a little differently than you do — let’s see if I can find out why. I’ll start with cars. I’d say that the main thing that makes it possible for there to be an enormous variety of automobiles is the road....
November 30, 2016
The technological history of modernity, as I conceive of it, is a story to be told in light of a theological anthropology. As what we now call modernity was emerging, in the sixteenth century, this connection was widely understood. Consider for instance the great letter that Rabelais’ giant Gargantua writes to his son Pantagruel when...