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
November 16, 2013
I’m not quite sure what to do with this essay by Roy Scranton on learning to live — or rather, learning to die — in the Anthropocene. The heart of the essay may be found in its concluding paragraphs: The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should...
November 15, 2013
See part one here Thirty years after that supernova made its remarkable appearance in Earth’s skies, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe would recall his first sight of it: Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still with my eyes fixed intently upon it. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone...
November 14, 2013
a superbright supernova Historians have long debated the role that King Charles IX played in the great and terrible St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572. It has been common to give the primary responsibility to his mother, Catherine de Medici, and to see the King as meekly complying with her wishes — but one...
November 13, 2013
draft manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land I’ve been reading a fascinating new book by a young scholar named Hannah Sullivan on The Work of Revision: it’s an account of how modernist poets and novelists incorporated revision into their writerly work. Sullivan notes that for the Romantics spontaneity was essential to true art:...
November 8, 2013
Siegel: It’s safe to say that, like life itself, fiction’s properties are countless and unquantifiable. Well … okay. Can’t really disagree with that, though I’m not sure what it means. If art is made ex nihilo — out of nothing — But art isn’t made out of nothing, is it? It’s made out of pre-existing ideas, experiences,...
November 7, 2013
Albert Camus is much in the literary news right now, as the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of his birth. Here is an essay on him that I published in Books and Culture in 1996, with a few small edits and links. When I think of Albert Camus, two photographic images come to mind. The first is of that face, both thoughtful and...
November 6, 2013
Here’s a thoughtful brief review by Siobhan Phillips of Daily Rituals, a book by Mason Currey based on his now-dormant blog Daily Routines. Phillips: An artist’s schedule is important, Currey’s book reminds us, for its refusal to squeeze the most working minutes out of the artist’s waking hours. At a moment when we’re working...
November 6, 2013
I often think about a passage from Umberto Eco’s book Kant and the Platypus in which he records a debate he had with Richard Rorty about philosophy as a way of “redescribing” the world: In a debate held in 1990 with regard to the existence or otherwise of textual criteria of interpretation, Richard Rorty … denied that the use...
November 5, 2013
Hey y’all, and apologies for the radio silence for the past few days — I’ve been back to Wheaton for a conference and a visit with my son and some old friends, and am trying to get back into the teaching saddle here at Baylor. I may post my talk from the conference, but in the meantime, busy yourselves with this excellent article...
November 1, 2013
In this really interesting conversation between the novelist Donna Tartt and her editor Michael Pietsch, Pietsch quotes from a memo Tartt wrote to her copy editor: I am terribly troubled by the ever-growing tendency to standardized and prescriptive usage, and I think that the Twentieth century, American-invented conventions of House...