Category: words

META-HYPERTEXT

  • What is a text? How does your understanding of the author’s intent and references change your experience of the text? And where does hypertext take you? “Consider the possibility that every written work is a hypertext, a fabric of many works woven together. Despite how original, unique or authoritative any text might appear to be, it’s really a hypertext with links into hundreds or thousands of other works.” – *spark-online

VOICE OF A NON-GENERATION

Dave Eggers has been anointed the new new thing for his debut book. And certainly the attention is well deserved. But many of the glowing tributes miss the point of his “anti” memoir. In fact, it’s more like an “ultra” memoir, “almost confessional in its eagerness to put virtually every question of substance, memory, and motive plainly before the reader. And the habits that mark Eggers’s writing – the suspicion of all that purports to be authentic, the constant urge to peer behind the curtain – seem less like examples of “the latest postmodern hardware,” than characteristics of a certain generational vernacular, whose sources are widely recognized (six hours of television a day, advertising metastasized to every cranny of life, and the conventions of post-Watergate journalism, to name a few), but whose real purpose is just as widely misunderstood. – American Prospect

OLD THINKING IN NEW CLOTHES

Retro glue attaches old thinking, old values, and old habits to new technologies. Retro glue can be a comfort, allowing the best elements of the old to adhere to the new so that we can see how similar the new thing is to our old standbys. It’s what drove Model T’s to look like buggies, what prompted early movies to be staged like theater. The e-book devices all strive to present a page of text exactly like a familiar printed page, and the button that turns each “page” doesn’t even require you to consult a user’s manual. But retro glue can also attach things that don’t belong. And the retro glue dripping off the e-book may, I fear, attach the worst of the last century’s paradigm of intellectual property to the new century’s publishing models. – Chronicle of Higher Education

EXPERTS FROM AFAR

Canada has turned out some first-rate writers, writers whose talent has been recognized internationally. But “Canadian society is incapable of making a book a ‘classic’; we cannot ‘elect,’ as it were, books of significance. As a society we are still excited by Anne of Green Gables.” So we let the Americans do it for us. – National Post (Canada)

SAVING JOYCE

“Weary of the Dublin authorities’ failure to save the setting for Joyce’s short story The Dead, Brendan Kilty has decided to do it himself. He has bought 15 Ushers Island, a derelict Liffey quayside house, and intends returning it to the way it was in the writer’s day.” – The Times (UK)

FEAR NOT THE BIGS

After seven months of study, a Canadian government  commission studying the publishing industry concludes “that bookstore giant Chapters and its wholesale outlet Pegasus are not the problem that some of the small bookstores and publishers have alleged.” – CBC

FEAST FOR THE SENSES

Many have called it the greatest novel of the 20th century – James Joyce’s “Ulysses”certainly seems to stir up the passions of some of the world’s most intelligent people. June 16th is Bloomsday (the day in which Ulysses takes place), and Australian Joyce-ophiles will celebrate by eating, reading…and breathing heavily.  – Sydney Morning Herald

“GATSBY” REVEALED

A new version of “Great Gatsby” surfaces – this the pre-edit draft that gives some insight into the creation of the man. “This early version is Gatsby before the final fitting: That gorgeous pink rag of a suit is baggy in places; in that soft, rich heap of beautiful shirts, some have collars that are too loose and sleeves a touch too long.” – New York Observer