Category Archives: Dissertation

A single rich document

The codex is built for nonlinear reading – not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides.

—Lev Grossman

It’s Marshall McLuhan’s 100th bday…

…today (or would’ve been if he hadn’t died in 1980!).

I just want to say, ahem, when I chose media ecology as one of my comps areas, no one was talking about Marshall McLuhan. Now? He’s trending. Yes, I am prescient. 😉

This video is awesome. (It’s from a CBC program called Explorations and aired May 18, 1960.)

(via The Georgia Straight)

A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all

Paul Theroux really doesn’t like blogs:

You could say blog-like, but I think “blog-like” is a disparaging term. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all. It’s a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

—Paul Theroux

Oh, PT. I do love your writing, but I think you’re conflating form and content. There are plenty of books that could be described as “illiterate,” “hasty,” “babbling,” and without “any literary merit” (see, e.g.: any book “written” by a reality show personality) but somehow I doubt you loathe books or think calling something “book-like” is disparaging. Am I right?

What must happen

[Friday Night Lights]’s sole focus is on the episodes themselves, resisting what has become standard in TV marketing – online franchising in the form of tabloid features, extensive merchandising, and audience participation via wiki fan sites.  … It’s a crucial decision, if you think of FNL (and I do) as well-crafted art.  The serial narrative – in both TV and literature – when offered up to fans as participants, can become vulnerable.  …  The creators of FNL are not interested in what fans want or need to happen to the characters, but rather about what must happen to them, in the world they’ve created.

—Sonya Chung

My reading time would just feel like work time

I don’t have an electronic reader, or whatever those are called. I’m still old school and I like holding the pages. Also, I look at a computer screen and a blackberry all f-cking day. I need some separation from that, and I feel like if I were to read off one of those future readers, my reading time would just feel like work time. So I’m a relic.

—Lainey Lui

 

Exhausting

This is going to sound incredibly lazy, like someone who gets in their car to drive a few blocks rather than walk, but the physicality of the book, having to hold it open then lift and turn each page, was a lot more exhausting than I remembered. All of that holding and lifting and turning distracted me from the act of reading, took me out of the story if you will. A few pages into it I gave up, logged in to Amazon, and bought the Kindle book.

—Kim White

LOLOLOL. Sorry, yes. Sure, you can prefer screen-reading to print-reading. But claiming turning pages is exhausting? Please.

Print is Dead and the Espresso Book Machine

I recently read Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, one of the main arguments of which is that even though a lot of people like print books and think ebooks are fixing something that isn’t broken, they should just get with the program, because eventually the only books that are going to be available in print are Dan Brown and his ilk.

But I wonder. Sure, one day bookstores may no longer stock pbooks. Maybe there won’t even be bookstores. But with print-on-demand technology, it would be ridiculously easy for publishers to continue to make it possible for anyone to get a print copy of any book they want—even if they do transition primarily to ebooks. So just from a technological standpoint, the whole “print is dead” thing seems a bit overblown.