Kierkegaard recognized, over 150 years ago, that we live life forward but we understand it backward. He was speaking about our being immersed in time itself: The simple truth that we live our present moments in a sort of confusion continuously being clarified by the retrospective understanding that comes later. Most novelists work to soften…
Imagination is a powerful social tool. The novel provides us with a sustained window into another world, while still exercising the creative faculties that make us co-creators of the worlds we read about. Having said all that, I am aware that there may be some confirmation bias operating, as I here introduce an article that…
I’m not reallye sure if the blogosphere works like that any more, though. I find blog posts in my rss reader or on twitter or Facebook and only rarely by following links from other blogs as I used to do. Maybe I exaggerate – but it seems to me that blogs link to each other…
What happens to our books when we die? Many books disappear before we do, of course; they fall apart, or we put them out on the stoop for scavengers. A book like this one, however — a text that is still read and reprinted, that has played a notable role in the 20th-century imagination, and…
The cast for “Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendeiner Hogan Bogan Logan Was Her Name” poses with Mr. McFeely (David Newell) at the Fayette County Fair, Jun 16. My daughter plays the young Catalina, who also narrates. In the photo, she’s the one holding the book (with some her lines taped inside. Shh, don’t tell!) Working…
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I find it really amazing that it has taken this long for Amazon to finally shrink that ridiculously huge margin, which persisted like fake stirrups on a horseless carriage. Similar:McCain's 2008 Concession Speech: Republicans interrupt their candidate's concession speech…That moment during McCain’s concession s…CultureHow PatrioticAmusingSo Long Blogging. Hello—Yep, We're Going to Say It—PloggingI still blog,…
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To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:I've Stopped Creating Syllabi. Now I Create Syllabuses.At some point, using “syllabi” as the pl…AcademiaThe Best of Both Worlds, Part 2 ( #StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 1) Your res…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year…
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…
Wish I had come across this a little earlier in the term… too late it to add it to my “Media and Culture” new media seminar. Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take…
I knew Rather was still fighting, but I didn’t know what he’s saying now about the Killian memos that ended his career: A CBS-commissioned investigation of the disaster—headed by Richard Thornburgh, U.S. attorney general when Bush’s father was president, and Associated Press chief executive Louis D. Boccardi—faulted Rather and his top producer, Mary Mapes, among…
Walden, A Game simulates both personal and environmental life, modeling the basic personal needs outlined by Thoreau, as well as some of the more experiential concepts he described. Furthermore, the game takes advantage of the detailed notes that Thoreau took about the pond, and its surrounding landscape, flora and fauna. —Walden, A Game – USC…
His real name was Geisel, Theodor (with no “e”). An incredibly generous Author was he. An alum from the class of nineteen twenty-five, They say he gave more than any alive. And for that they’ll remember him and his wife (the woman with whom he spent most of his life). The medical school will carry…
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My students are finishing up Hayles, My Mother was a Computer. Some years go, I remember seeing a video of a little girl in a martial arts uniform, barking out “Know what you want! Make a plan! Add a role model! Review your progress!” over and over again, while kicking, chopping and spinning. Her philosophy…
My undergraduates are working their way through N. Katherine Hayle’s My Mother Was a Computer. They told me that they benefitted from the notes I wrote the other day, so I’m continuing the effort. In Chapter 3, Hayles reminds us that the “worldviews of speech, writing, and code” are not merely theories, they are…
I’m withholding judgment until I find out exactly what the argument was about. Perhaps the punch was appropriate. Ann Arbor police Lt. Renee Bush said the man went to a party at a home in the 100 block of North Ingalls Street at about 2 p.m. on Saturday. Bush said the man was sitting on…
Hayles is an established authority on a humanities-centered approach to human-computer interactions, and My Mother Was a Computer (2005) is her third book on the topic. At times she writes with the expectation that her readers already know some foundational topics that she may have spent more time introducing in her previous books. In the…
Looks like this blogger presented the chart as an implicit argument about the quality of literature being read today, rather than the quantity. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition…