Category: writing
-
Q: To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind.
A: And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs,…
-
International Tweet Grace Paley Day, December 11
All that is really necessary for the survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. Recently, I set out for a short stroll through Twitter. I follow too many people, for too many reasons I’ve long since forgotten. I’ve made lists to filter my feed and increase the…
-
Prize Season
I was a book critic for many years, so I know November is a heady time in the book world. Because December is the month where the vast majority of books are sold (Merry Christmas!) if you can get a book noticed in November, through a spot on a shortlist, or better yet, a prize,…
-
A Personal Glossary of Writing Disorders
An example of “alien handwriting” courtesy of www.abduct.com We’ve all heard of post-partum depression. But after giving birth to premature twin boys, who later died, Alice Flaherty developed a rare case of post-partum mania, and with it hypergraphia, a chronic, compulsive urge to write. “The world was flooded with meaning. I believed I had unique…
-
E-reading For Pleasure
If you haven’t read anything yet on Twitter’s new blogging platform, Medium, here’s a nice place to start. Finnish HCI student Jussi Ahola contemplates the various ways that e-readers don’t, and could better exploit the design concept of “socio-pleasure,” the social pleasure we take take in objects beyond their use value. Designing for socio-pleasure
-
Rakoff Revisited
Last week I saw Sarah Vowell on Stephen Colbert, there to publicize Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel the posthumous book by the brilliantly acidic, but always self-aware David Rakoff. I interviewed Rakoff for The Montreal Mirror in 2010. He was here to visit the city of his birth, and to talk about Half…
-
Almost everything you need to know about the great e-book war, part 2
I tweeted my last post to Laura Miller at Salon.com. Her reply, “@JulietWaters Good point, but so far they’ve had difficulty w/this because they lack physical stores: http://bit.ly/Yabi7d.” Follow the shortlink and you’ll find Miller’s March article on Amazon’s problem convincing writers that they might want to give up print books, and bookstores that they…
-
Almost everything you need to know about the great e-book war
Salon’s Laura Miller has written this great primer on the main issues involved in the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-trust suit being brought against Apple. But I still think she may be missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. It’s a complex case, but the gist of it is: did Apple collude with the major publishers…
-
New York Times to partner with Byliner and Vook
Some very interesting news yesterday from Digital Book World. The New York Times is partnering with Byliner and Vook to produce a series of e-books. I first heard about Byliner about a year an half ago when I spent a month at the Banff Centre, hanging out with Robert Boynton, director of NYU’s literary reportage…
Clear Path Learning 