April 14, 2009
Decorate Just Like Gatsby
One of those things that either might be fantastically new and crazy, or which everyone but me has already heard of. Namely, a service where you can buy books in […]
April 13, 2009
Amazon: what happens from here?
Returning from Easter weekend, my GoogleReader is full of articles about the Amazon debacle. In case yours wasn’t, here’s a quick run-down: Amazon eliminated “adult” material from the sales rankings. […]
April 13, 2009
The Long Literary Canon
Sometimes I tend to be a few years late. Present example: I’m only now reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More […]
April 5, 2009
Short Takes
The story of twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman in this week’s New Yorker was an excellent read. The darkest moment is perhaps the best described; the twins realized when […]
March 12, 2009
The Rise of Reading (or, the art of finding a quiet nook)
I’ve been pondering the NEA’s most recent “Reading on the Rise” report for over a month and don’t really know what to think of it after all the gloom and […]
March 10, 2009
A Smart Rant And a Butcher’s Bill
Two items caught my fancy today. They might otherwise seem only slightly related, but I would like to pair them together and see what we get. First, via Christopher Shea’s […]
March 5, 2009
Making the Text Jump – Part Two
Last week I began spinning out some thoughts on hyperlinking and the compositional process. Here’s some more of the same, pushed a bit further…. A couple of months ago, I […]
February 28, 2009
Short Takes: Digital Rights
It’s a big week for audio rights in the book world. After last week’s op-ed piece in The New York Times by Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors’ Guild […]
February 24, 2009
Making the Text Jump ??? Part One
I’ve been reading William Styron again. For reasons that I can only claim have nothing to do with personal origins (at least, not entirely ??? honest), I have long wanted […]
February 18, 2009
The Unseen Efficiencies
I had two loves in my younger days: literature and basketball. Poetry is a finger roll, short stories are games, seasons are novels. Learning the system of one helped me […]
February 3, 2009
Everything New Is Old Again. …Wait, What?
I meant to pass this along a couple of weeks ago when the original news broke. You have probably seen it by now: literally, a printed newspaper of the previous […]
January 26, 2009
This Post is Brought to Ye by the Letter Thorn
Pictures via Smoot. I ran into someone I hadn’t expected to see again today. Seamus Heaney had introduced us a long while ago, but the last place I expected to […]