So a Wired post in “A Geeks Guide to the Galaxy,” I think by David Barr Kirtley, and a post on SyFy Channel’s official blog by Marc Bernadin, both quote Michael Chabon insisting that writing professors are biased against genre fiction in general and science fiction in particular. “I had a lot of shameful, cowardly […]
Continue reading →via Flickr user Amalia D
Continue reading →I’m with those people who feel that certain protectors of the essential term and idea “irony” often go too far. Certainly more things are ironic than the most cautious of its policemen are willing to entertain. But still, there’s a whole subset of bad writing that is plagued by an almost defiantly poor handle on […]
Continue reading →Serial pedant and curmudgeon Jonathan Franzen has come out against Twitter, and engendered the typical reaction. I don’t agree with Franzen on almost anything, despite our shared anti-Twitter stance, and would not define Twitter’s problems in the same way as Franzen. As is so often the case, it strikes me that the counter-arguments are more telling than […]
Continue reading →“I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don’t think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don’t intend to choose […]
Continue reading →Via this post on Splitsider, I read this interesting account of the State’s doomed move to network television. Written by David Lipsky, it’s a well-researched piece of immersive journalism, one made rather poignant with the benefit of 16 years of distance. (The State and its members have had a ton of success, and yet there’s always […]
Continue reading →Very sorry this blog has been so quiet. I am deep in a very busy, very fulfilling semester. I promise to post several times in the next week. Some topics I’m working on: A review of Matt Yglesias’s The Rent Is Too Damn High! ebooklet– or should that be in quotations, and not italics?– and […]
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