I finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn this afternoon. I had never read it before, but on its reputation as a wildly popular autiobiographical novel, i put it on my syllabus. I wanted something that would cover urban literature, class & gender, and also be a good test case for New Historicism. The last…
My blog title is from a comment on this story: The estate of JRR Tolkien is embroiled in a fierce legal battle over an American novel that uses the author of The Lord of the Rings as a central character. via JRR Tolkien novel Mirkwood in legal battle with author’s estate | Books | The…
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What’s your favorite backchannel tool? A backchannel is a live electronic conversation that happens in the margins, while an event is taking place center stage. I really like the low entry barrier of TodaysMeet.com, but the auto-refresh does not work. Users must refresh manually. Further, TodaysMeet.com also shows an error message each time I post.…
If Apple forces the iOS Kindle app has to change to a Safari-based system (requiring web access) that would seriously damage the value of the ebooks I have purchased. Of course, that is part of Apple’s strategy, since Apple is not getting its cut of the income Amazon makes by selling books within the Kindke…
Somebody controls Facebook, and makes decisions about what Facebook will be like, and how Facebook will make money. Same goes for Twitter. Blogs are different, because no single company decides what blogs will be. Now that people who want to express themselves online have many different choices, and blogs are just the more writerly of…
Even if you think it’s “not fair” that someone in power can (and will) judge you based on your behavior in a social space, it’s a fact. Be liberal and tolerant when it comes to interpreting and responding to the behavior of others online, but be conservative and restrained about what you do. I write…
Amazon’s recently introduced digital “delivery fee,” charging publishers 15 cents per megabyte to transfer a book’s file to the Kindle, has forced some comics publishers to rethink using the Kindle platform. While novels are text-based and unlikely to run up a delivery charge much over $0.02, graphic novels have a much higher bandwidth, and could…
At Seton Hill, Christina Michelmore is about to speak on the Egyptian Revolution. Packed house at Reeves Theater. #Michelmore 7:00 PM Feb 22nd Michelmore is chair of the History Department at Chatham University. She studies images of Muslims in the Western world. #Michelmore 7:07 PM Feb 22nd Setting up extra chairs for “What’s Happening in…
“It’s significant not only because of the size of the collection and the fact that there could easily be more books that Jefferson owned, but because of what books were found,” said Endrina Tay, librarian for technical services for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. “There are architectural books that Jefferson used when designing the…
Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today’s pre-adults are a different matter. They…
I’ve just gotten around to playing “Fine-Tuned,” a 2001 work of interactive fiction by Dennis Jerz. It’s a fun piece about a 1920s dandy with an automobile and an opera singer given a strange job. I’m about halfway through, and the game reportedly ends in a cliffhanger (which is disappointing), but so far I’m impressed…
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The next time I introduce interactive storytelling, I might use this very accessible overview. But all of these efforts were eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in 1969.While telling his daughters their story, Packard, then a lawyer who was “never comfortable with the law,” asked them what happened next. They…
Some years ago I picked up a nonfiction book that I think begins with the creation of four atoms in a supernova, and follows the path of these atoms as one becomes part of a new star, one becomes part of a life form, one falls into a black hole, etc. For some reason my…
Thoughtful analysis of the economics of the Huffington Post sale. The indie bloggers (which were a prominent part of the original mission of the site, and were responsible, through their inbound links, for giving the site its initial buzz, contribute only in a small way to the site’s income. One reason that The Huffington Post…
I’m fine-tuning my WordPress multisite blog installation. A blog is designed to look into the past, not the future. While it was a simple matter to turn MovableType into a rudimentary course management system by simply post-dating blog entries, WordPress goes out of its way to hide future content. I use the plugin “No Future…
My kids really enjoy the classes they take at Stage Right, a performing arts school in Greensburg. Its first class opened in 1998 with 12 students. Now the studio in Greensburg has as many as 180 students at a time, stages several student productions a year and has a professional season in which students work…
When the Huffington Post launched in 2005, I wondered, “What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?” On launch day, Many of the celebrities-turned-writers wrote initial entries that amounted…