Top Videos of 2008 , according to PopMatters. This Weezer album is just chock full of don't-tread-on-me songs.
To understand the next four years of American politics, you are going to need to understand something of the politics of ancient Greece and Rome.
Someone has written an actual academic paper on The War between n+1 and The Elegant Variation @drmabuse who can "summarize the whole incident in one tweet" ).The litbloggers’ practice of linking also emphasizes the intertextuality of their form. In literary theory, intertextuality “denotes ways in which works of art – especially of literature – are produced in response not to social reality but to previous works of art and the codes and other conventions governing them” (Sebeok 1985: 657). Intertextuality is not confined to art but is also evident “across writing genres and related to more epistemologically explicit issues” such as global politics (Shapiro 1989:11). Rather than creating a new class of literary work or genre, litbloggers engage in a process of intertextuality that responds to previous aesthetic codes but also political codes that are embedded in our literary political economy. In this sense, rather than producing a new, alternative book culture, litbloggers instead may be solidifying the dominant codes and conventions that are already in place. Litbloggers may, and some do, avoid being accomplices to the reification of dominant discourses by not only providing links but also challenging the source of the links. This is where their power of critique lies and perhaps where they may exercise more freedom than print media whose codes and conventions have concretized since the development of print over fifteen hundred years ago.
I'm planning to try to clear out my bookmarks via separate posts rather than one stack, so we'll see how that goes. Here's one!largehearted boy ) lists the 10 Best Literature Blogs - I had never heard of Literary Kicks .
Maps and Legends by Michael ChabonSmogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kellyreviewing it for the LA Times earlier this month, so I stand behind my positive remarks.The Best American Essays 2007 Harper's posted after Wallace's death, I came across "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage" and realized that - in combination with the introduction "Deciderization 2007: A Special Report" - I would be completely justified in devoting the first week of class to Wallace and introducing him to a gaggle of teenagers. Fortunately, I teach at a school where the students are intellectually advanced, and they unwittingly helped me grieve for this man whom I did not know but mourn nonetheless.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DiazThe Last Novel by David Markson
Since I am shackled to the radiator of my ambition and unable to take full advantage of these events, I thought I'd post them here so others could do my living for me.The Art of War: American Posters from WWI and WWII"Dashiell Hammett ... in L.A.?”
Does Obama's win signal a more literary future for America?This AP article , which quotes Toni Morrison and Rick Moody among other writers, ponders the possibility of a cultural trickle-down effect. Jonathan Safran Foer, for one, is feeling it:
"Until now, my identity as a writer has never overlapped with my identity as an American — in the past eight years, my writing has often felt like an antidote or correction to my Americanism," says "Everything Is Illuminated " novelist Jonathan Safran Foer .
"But finally having a writer-president — and I don't mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word — I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer."
NaNoWriMo has forwarded a letter of encouragement from Philip Pullman :You've started a long journey. Congratulations on your resolution and ambition! And the first thing you need to remember is that a long journey can't be treated like a sprint. Take your time. The second thing you need to remember is that if you want to finish this journey you've begun, you have to keep going. One of the hardest things to do with a novel is to stop writing it for a while, do something else, fulfill this engagement or that commitment or whatever, and pick it up exactly where you left it and carry on as if nothing had happened. You will have changed; the story will have drifted off course, like a sh ip when the engines stop and there's no anchor to keep it in place; when you get back on board, you have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the ship moving through the water again, work out your position, check the compass bearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track ... all that energy wasted on doing something that wouldn't have been necessary at all if you'd just kept going! You know which page of a novel is the most difficult to write? It's page 70. The first page is easy: it's exciting, it's new, a whole world lies in front of you. The last page is easy: you've got there at last, you know what's going to happen, all you have to do is find a resonant closing sentence. But page 70 is where the misery strikes. All the initial excitement has drained away; you've begun to see all the hideous problems you've set yourself; you are horribly aware of the minute size of your own talent compared to the colossal proportions of the task you've undertaken. That's when you'll want to give up. When I hit page 70 with my very first novel, I thought: I'm never going to finish this. I'll never make it. But then stubbornness set in, and I thought: well, if I reach page 100, that'll be something. If I get there, I reckon I can make it to the end, wherever that is. And 100 is only 30 pages away, and if I write 3 pages every day, I can get there in ten days ... why don't I just try to do that? So I did. It was a terrible novel, but I finished it.
...for a return to blogging about books!
For more Obama photos by Callie Shell, click here .
I review Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles LA Times
"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm." - Mark Twain
