Like a lot of hand-wringers, I’ve been lately wringing my hands over the future of the publishing industry. This interview with Richard Nash of Soft Skull has both soothed my worries and stoked some ideas I’ve been thinking about the future of the arts.
What I’ve been thinking is this: As giant media companies [...]
GoodReads is a fairly excellent social networking site, as far as social networking sites go. It’s much closer to hanging out in an actual bookstore than visiting an online bookstore like Amazon, so that’s nice.
But it has the same faults as any other social network:
How can Twilight be both one of the “Best Books [...]
History isn’t dead, though a politics of and for amnesia has increasingly shown itself to be the name of the game. Outside of that realm of double-think and rabid ideological differences, it is interesting to see who becomes rediscovered, brought back into the discourse after periods of obscurity. Such a person is Noah Webster, the [...]
This is a few days old, but I was too busy linking to old British sketch shows last week to talk about it then. Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, is arguing that Sarah Palin getting elected might not be as utterly disastrous for the entire world as most people think. He [...]
As far as contemporary absolute leaders are concerned, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il certainly ranks as one of the most interesting. To say nothing of his policies, politics, and views, he has been seen as larger–and decidedly stranger–than life. Known as a gourmand despite the contradictions inherent in that lifestyle vis Communist practice, he has been [...]
If you have a few hours to spare, I recommend taking a look at Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, by Peter Allison. The title is pretty self-explanatory, and the book is just a series of anecdotes about the author’s time spent as a guide in the Okavango Delta. [...]
The conspiracy theory craze of the 1990s–criticized and largely explored in some of Steve Beard’s journalism from his collections Logic Bomb: Transmissions from the Edge of Style Culture and Aftershocks: The End of Style Culture–helped further open up and prime the public’s willing desire to believe that the forces that seemed to control their bank [...]
One of the Last Arch-Modernists.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, French artist and pioneer of the “new novel” died this past week aged 85. Robbe-Grillet had one of the most maddeningly difficult world-views of the 20th century. His cold prose, disdain for conventional narrative structure, and emphasis on experiential memory set his work part from even his [...]