Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services..
I missed my chance to send a telegram! I never needed that chance, though. Still, there’s something romantic, to me, about the telegram. Email is technically a telegram, so is the document you are reading, but I still think it would be nice to recieve a small piece of paper written in that special shorthand. Oh well, too late.
Last weekend, one of my writer friends told me “You’re so damn obsessed with structure! Stop playing with blocks and build something already!” or something to that effect. I sat down to do that, and I put my outline away.
Every so often, some pundit tells the world that the death of print is on its way. Allusions to Gutenberg are all around. The relationship between technology is podered, etc. Robert McCrum adds to this discussion with a recent article in The Guardian entitled “E-read all about it” (source: Grumpy Old Bookman)
It’ll be ten years or more until a viable electronic book is produced? Why! Can’t they just tweak the iPod a bit?
Arts Journal’s Ideas Blog has called my attention to an interesting article, entitled Journalism’s Paper Tigers
Newspapers used to have a monopoly on information, and it is taking them a long time to get used to the idea that they have lost it. A century ago, in every American city, various Heralds, Timeses, Tribunes and Gazettes may have competed with each other, but as a mass medium, the newspaper enjoyed total primacy. Everything about newspapering is negotiable these days: who writes, who reads, who pays, what should be covered and how. Even as they shovel the daily quota of prose, editors are pondering existential questions. What gives a newspaper its soul?
Since moving to the Copycat, my warehouse home in Baltimore, I have often felt like A Coder in Courierland. Two of my roomates are what some would call “bike punks”. Last night, they had a gathering here, trick-riding their customized bikes in the livingroom, and planning their next bicycle rally.
The bike rallies are interesting things. Each biker is given a list of addresses, and they test their courier abilities by finding the addresses in a race. At each location, there is a task to complete, a riddle or a scavenger-hunt to complete, and the race goes on…
“Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? … The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.”
:: Hugo Ball
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Everyone I talk to about them is afriad of the clowns. What kind of world is this?
My friend, The Elegant Savage, has published a memoir-excerpt from the first war in Iraq.
A mythical monster, believed by some to have lived for hundreds of years in the murky depths of a Swedish lake, is now fair game for hunters – if they can find it.
That’s right. If there is one at all, there is only one, so kill it! Good thinking.
Dear God, they’ve illustrated “The Elements of Style” with watercolors! Watercolors, I tell you! Watercolors are not my style; furthermore, watercolors aren’t what I would have chosen to illustrate the book with, either. In fact, I would not have chosen to illustrate the book at all.
I prefer my grandmothers old copy of the book, because it was my grandmother’s, and even my grandmother preferred to paint with oils.
Failing that, I’d prefer to get the book via internet freeloading, since it is old enough to be in the public domain. The full text of the updated E.B. White version of The Elements of Style is readily available on the internet.
My source, about.com, tells me:
In E.B. White’s introduction to the book’s third edition, he remarks that it “is encouraging to see how perfectly a book, even a dusty rule book, perpetuates and extends the spirit of a man. Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold, and his book is clear, brief, bold.”
I think that there are clearer, bolder visual elements than the watercolor, but to their credit, my source also tells me:
In The Elements of Style Illustrated, Kalman has mined subtle humor for her imaginative paintings from the textual examples of Strunk and White’s rules. The resulting images appear every three or four pages throughout the book and draw the browsing reader’s attention to the rules themselves. Wonderfully vivid and playful, these pictures add another dimension to the rule book, … Maira Kalman’s paintings are the very essence of boldness, and their inclusion in these pages does a great deal to enliven the rules of language beside them. A new generation of English students will soon walk the hallowed halls of education, quite oblivious to their good fortune in having The Elements of Style Illustrated, in all its synergistic glory, bouncing around in their backpacks.
Now, it could be that those aren’t watercolors. Shoot me if they’re not.
Just before dinnertime, I took a walk across the Guilford Street Bridge. Winds drove themselves between buildings, bringing with them smells of the sea, smells of food cooking, a million dinners. There, in the middle of the street, was a man introducing himself to no one. But it was not no one. There were many of them. But there were not many of them. No one else was there.
“Yo!”, he said, and assumed the posture of a man introducing himself. He turned, as if in conversation with a group, and spoke inaudibly. He waited for something less audible, and laughed as though in response to a joke. He pitched his head behind him at an angle, as toward a voice calling him from behind, but there was only the wind, so far as I could see.
I am very proud of Garrett Dimon for saying something that has been on my mind for a very long time.
Continue Reading
This is a quoptation from an interesting article I found via Arts & Letters Daily. The article is from the issue dated May 6, 2005 of The Chronicle of Higher Education
One question followed me from lecture to lecture, from talk show to talk show, bookstore to bookstore. Because the question was so automatic, so predictable, it took me months to appreciate how peculiar it was.
At a book signing, I might give a short introduction to this or that aspect of Listening to Prozac, discussing workplace pressures to remain upbeat, say, and the ethics of using medications in response. What I spoke about seemed not to matter. Inevitably someone would ask: “What if so-and-so had taken Prozac?” The candidates for drug treatment were drawn from a short roster of tortured 19th-century artists and writers. Friedrich Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe made frequent appearances.
My response was perfunctory — a quick review of theories of art and neurosis. I resented the joking distraction from issues I had raised. I did not treat the what if question as I did others. I did not attend to it, puzzle over it, take it to heart.
And then one day I did. The setting was a professional meeting in Copenhagen, in 1995.
You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.
Create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. But please only put one secret on a card. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards. (Please do not email your secret.)
Please put your complete secret and image on one side of the postcard.
I guess its serendipity. I spent part of Friday afternoon updating the links page to reflect a long list of literary websites, resources, and weblogs. I did this with the hope that NoCategories might become a more literary endevor.
Today, I recieved an email requesting that I write a book review, and an offer for a free review copy.
I know I complained earlier about all the “Buzz Balls & Hype” that can engulf a website that writes book reviews.
It seems as if the realm of the literary blog is already beginning to diverge. There are the so called “literary blogs” that discuss reading and writing, and then there are the ones that serve promotional purposes for a struggling writer, the so-called “author website”. Need I bother to mention that I prefer the former to the later?
Its not just something that happens to literary websites. I’ve noticed a recent proliferation of advertizing on the Gawker family of blogs. On one recent entry — it is a very funny article called “Lies I Have Told Verizon DSL Support Today” — the ads are so thick you can barely find the text of the article! Those blogs are starting to remind me of the mid-90′s websites, with all the clutter, etc. Blogging Pro put it well, with the headline: “Gizmodo Revamps RSS Feeds to Make More Money”
To the credit of the Gizomdo Blogs, Blogging Pro mentions:
Gizmodo seems to have developed a fair policy of delivering partial ad-free feeds or full feeds with advertising enclosed. Readers choice. The ads are placed every fifth entry so the reader is not bombarded with sales pitches.
It seems that Web Syndication is a viable way to avoid the kind of bombardment I’m complaining about.
To return to the topic at hand, I’m resolved not to let that kind bombardment happen in my little internet garden here. While I’m delighted to get a free book for review, and would be delighted to do so in the future, I’ll do my very best to be fair in my assesment of such a book.
Besides, any press is good press.
I watched a documentary today, as part of my new science class. Yes, I did just graduate. Yes, I am taking a class. No, I don’t want to talk very much about it. Its a science class.
The documentary was interesting enough, about the very primitive microbes on the Earth. It was still a documentary though.
Continue Reading
I’ll have to look at this new logo for a while before I can decide whether I like it or not. Lord knows I spent plenty of time looking at the old logo when I was a kid….
