A Slight Delay

A few posts back, I’d written about a list of 100+ books that–according to its compiler–people buy to impress other people, but usually don’t read. I didn’t really buy any of these to impress anybody, so I can’t speak to how well they’d work on that account. The only rules here are that the books have to be good, and that I have to have read them. Thanks to Phil for the idea…

1. The Dialogic Imagination, by Mikhail Bakhtin: Bakhtin doesn’t have the same name recognition as Barthes, Derrida, or Foucault. All of which made these writings great source material when you had a paper due in English Lit. Doesn’t hurt either when you have someone who chronically name-drops literary critics, philosophers, and others of that ilk. Remember, all you need is to have at least one person up your sleeve of whom you can say: “What do you mean you’ve never heard of…?” (more…)

I’m not sure what it is about me that everyone thinks I need to be converted to something else. Catholics, Muslims, Jehova’s Witnesses, and Protestants of practically every stripe think that I need to join their crowd. It’s like PBS with loaves and fishes; a perfectly innocent everyday conversation is chugging along nicely, only to be brought to a screeching halt by some kind of churchy pledge drive.

This has happened so often that I’ve come up with some coping strategies in case anyone decides that there’s something religiously or theologically wrong with you. Use as many of the following as are necessary ‘til your interlocutor has had enough/sobs with frustration. (more…)

Starting today, I’ll be posting from time to time–once a week, hopefully–my own thoughts on writing, plus writing prompts and exercises. As with pretty much everything else you’ve read, or will read, here, this isn’t something on which I’m an expert. Hopefully you’ll find something useful regardless. Here goes nothing…

If you write, or you’ve even thought all that much about writing, someone’s probably told you the old writer’s mantra: “Write what you know.” Sometimes, especially if you’re staring at a blank page or screen for minutes, hours, or days on end, this can be useful advice. What you know and the things with which you’re comfortable can be a touchstone as much in writing as they are in life.

They can be limiting at the same time. Speaking for myself, I find a lot of my day-to-day life to be… shall we say, dull? I’ll never be mistaken for Jackie Wilson (”Mr. Excitement”), that’s for damn sure. Sooner or later, if you’re writing only about the things you know, you settle into a sameness in your writing. (more…)

Update: “About” page has been split into “About the Author” and “About the Blog.”

Torn Paige is the website of Paige Finkelman, who routinely blogs about technology, marketing, web communities, and the like. On the surface, that’s nothing special. The twist, though, is that unlike many of the blogs I’ve seen on these subjects–and if you’re paying attention, there’s oodles of them–hers is written in plain English. If, like me, you’re a layperson trying to simultaneously make sense of this stuff and also take advantage of it, that’s no small consideration.

Granted, this may not be everyone’s cup of chai. But if her beat is even of tangental interest to you, the blog itself is worth a quick read or three.

Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, and sometimes a scarf is just a damned scarf.

As if to prove her egalitarian bona fides, Michelle Malkin has added Dunkin Donuts to the list of proposed boycotts of chains for purely idiotic reasons.* Not content with mudslinging over the left and immigration (the columnist, born in the States to parents who were here on visas, believes that children born to noncitizen parents don’t deserve citizenship; when’s she going to revoke hers?) she’s now turned her attention to the purveyor of starchy goodness and cheap, high-octane coffee. She called for like-minded Americans (pause here and let that thought sink in… terrified? Good, let’s continue) to boycott the chain because to her, it appeared as though they decked Rachel Ray out in a black and white scarf that looked like something that Yasir Arafat would wear on casual Fridays.

Call me silly, but I don’t think that Dunkin Donuts is a hotbed of jihadi fervor. I could be wrong here, but it strikes me as difficult to sneak subliminal messages into an Old Fashioned. Or to hide an ayatollah in a jelly donut. I’ve seen scarves like that on mannequins, old ladies, and the occasional snowman. Unless Al-Qaeda is getting very desperate, I don’t think we have anything to fear here. I just can’t see them recruiting Frosty. I hear those Afghan summers are pretty brutal, besides…

Anyway. Perhaps the best response to this whole thing would be to drink Dunkin Donuts coffee by the gallon, and stuff your face with Boston Creme donuts ’til you puke. Better still, the French Crullers. That’d really piss her off.

Postscript: The story’s unhappy ending: the chain caved and pulled the ad.

*see also the Starbucks Mermaid story…

“Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship.” –Walter Benjamin, from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

We’ve heard it all before. It’s the latest Megatrend, or the latest Microtrend. Some day, somewhere, somehow, computers will upend everything, right down to the way we think, and the nature of what makes us human.

According to the conventional wisdom, the linearity of words on the printed page encouraged linear, rational thought. This set down on paper–literally–ideas of narrative flow and stylistic constraints that have been with us for centuries since.

We were led to believe, early on, that hypertext would upend this model; by rearranging the printed page (and the media experience), it could (theoretically) rearrange human thought. The argument went–as it had earlier for word processing, with its ease of cut-and-paste–that this would divorce thought and narrative from convergent, linear models, in favor of divergent and wide-ranging associations. Add sound and visual elements to the mix, and you have–in theory–the perfect recipe for a medium that would result not only in truly new works of art, but a radically different approach to their creation.

(more…)

This amounts to a placeholder of sorts. I have a few things in the pipeline that should be posted this week, including one thing that I’m hoping to make a recurring series/theme on this site. I’ve re-structured the About pages. I’m also going to challenge myself by way of posting a challenge to whoever’s reading this: send your requests to aslightdelay (at) hotmail.com for things you’d like to see written about. I promise neither that I will write on all subjects suggested, nor that they’ll be any good, but hopefully the end result will be something worth reading.

Is it just me, or is there something inherently annoying in prefacing an apology by directing it to those you “may have offended”? I hate to be a cynic, but I suppose I ought not to have expected any different from a lawyer. Clinton’s MO during the dust-up over her RFK/Obama remarks has been consistent, if nothing else, with the way she’s run the rest of her campaign: say or do something that would get anyone else run out of town on a rail, then deny as much as possible, all while blaming everyone in sight. Blame anyone–the media, your opponent, American voters–but yourself.

This story has been covered extensively, to put it kindly. If you haven’t already gotten the rundown, this story in the New York Times is as good a place to start as any. And if you’ve had enough of the presumptive (though losing) Democratic nominee–whether for months now, or because this was the last straw–you’ll probably find a kindred spirit in Keith Olbermann, whose May 23 Special Comment should be listened to by anyone who has given Senator Clinton a free pass up to this point.

 Thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody for a post that will probably end up killing an afternoon. After the “Read The Rest of This Entry” link, you’ll find a list of 106 books that someone, somewhere, decided that people keep on their bookshelves to make them look smart. While I know some people use books as furniture (cf. Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture” in The Size of Thoughts), I guess I’ve never felt the need to impress someone with my reading list. If I did, I probably wouldn’t keep Dinosaur Bob or Bloom County Babylon in good company with Shakespeare.

Books I’ve read and purchased, I’ve bolded; I’m sure that there are books here that were on everybody’s required academic reading at one time or another, but if I liked it well enough to buy it and read it again, it goes into that category. Books I read at school and never really read again, for one reason or another, I’ve italicized. The rest I’ve just left as is. Here goes nothing… (more…)