Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB) When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007, for several weeks I could do little more than lie on the futon and worry about the work I was missing. During the first week or so, when I still imagined it was just the…
This article from NCTE comes at a good time for me, since I’m scheduled to teach a “Writing about Literature” class in the fall. It’s a PDF (booo!). Of all types of writing, writing about literature may seem the least practical. Who apart from scholars and English majors analyzes poetry after the age of 18? Even book…
The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton. The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be…
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Via this Time Magazine article, “How Not to be Hated on Facebook.” Similar:The Media Pyramid: “Any content where ideology leads to falsehood is bad for you.”You Are the Media You Eat CultureMeet the 12-year-old boy who makes games instead of going to schoolTurning on the anti-clickbait filter: Ho…CultureThrough the Looking Glass #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season…
I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year,…
Fascinating story of a forger who tricked both the Nazis and the Allies. Sounds like a great subject for a non-fiction novel. Brought in for questioning, van Meegeren refused to give up the name of the painting’s rightful owners and was sent to prison on charges of treason, a crime punishable by death. Six weeks…
I never actually had to teach my son to read. He went smoothly from being read to, to reading along, to reading on his own. The transition for my daughter has been a little rougher, so in the last year or so, whenever Carolyn showed an interest in reading, I’ve praised her for her accomplishment.…
My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this. As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no…
In the past few hours, I’ve gotten Friend requests from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway, as well as a a shady “Narrator Man” who calls himself invisible, and is a member of The Brotherhood. My students in an American Lit class have been working on a creative interpretation of a work of literature, and several…
Most small publishers only received letters from Google last week asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them know that soon their rights will revert to Google unless they “opt out” immediately. This gives small publishers two weeks to track down their writers, many of whom spend at least half the year in…
My class topic today was an introduction to oral presentations for a freshman writing course. The students had already given informal four-minute practice presentations earlier in the term, but they’re gearing up for a more formal presentation. So this article comes at a good time for me. The ability to give an engaging lecture doesn’t…
Another thought-provoking link from BoingBoing. Maybe the language is a bit alarmist, but that’s what gets the linkers linking. The Authors Guild — which represents a measly 8000 writers — brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of “orphan works” whose rightsholders can’t…
We Didn’t Start the Flame War. (Don’t listen to this one with urchins underfoot.) College Humor does not pull its punches when it satirizes (and celebrates) the depths to which human nature can stoop when participating in discussion threads. (My favorite bit is the Rick Astley impersonator, a reference to an internet meme of the…
An interesting introduction to literary Darwinism, from LiveScience.com: Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation — similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior. He joined forces with another Literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, as well as two evolutionary psychologists on the study. Their online…
My daughter has a terrible time settling down for the night, so about a year and a half ago when she randomly asked me to tell her a story, I very lamely told her, “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small…
I try to read to my kids for an hour every night — sometimes two hours, if we time everything right. Whenever I need about 20 minutes to do a load of laundry or make a phone call, I tell the kids “It’s time for the book game,” which involves each child picking a book…
The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here’s just a snippet: I’ve never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like “guard her man” or “I had my man beat”. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such…
There’s nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I’m happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring. SM: It’s kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge–not just of games, but…
No comment. Just watch it. Two minutes well-spent. Via Kairosnews. Similar:The Myth of the Unemployed Humanities MajorStudents who work their way up to leader…AcademiaA hedge fund’s ‘mercenary’ strategy: Buy newspapers, slash jobs, sell the buildings For Alden and its subsidiary, the Gann…BusinessHow are you holding up? What difficult choices have you made? How can we…