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Monthly Archives: June 2011

On Having Your Own Domain vs. Facebook/Tumblr/etc.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Thus John Scalzi: Popular sites come and go. One day MySpace is so popular that Weird Al snarks about it on a Top Ten hit, the next it’s being sold for parts for a sliver of its previous valuation. Friendster topped off at over 100 million users; now it’s got less then 10 million, most [...]

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On Categorizing Writers By Their Architecture: Sentence, Paragraph, Scene

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Yesterday in a comment I mentioned how I think that William Gass’s fiction demonstrates a focus on the sentence rather than other units, like paragraph, or scene. Perhaps I should have said it seems built from sentences, an architectural observation rather than one about the writer’s consciousness. Later, I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea. [...]

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Lars Iyer Interview

Sunday, June 26, 2011

My background lies in philosophy, and that’s what I teach; I run a course called Philosophical Studies at Newcastle University. I specialise in the work of various thinkers within so-called ‘continental philosophy’ – the thought of continental Europe in the last couple of centuries. The challenge of continental philosophy as studied in Britain was to [...]

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On Books On Writing: A Bibliography

Sunday, June 26, 2011

I’ve read almost every book on writing that’s crossed my path since I was ten. I don’t mean books on grammar, or books on the history of rhetoric, or books on specialized kinds of writing (well, some books on speculative fiction). I mean books on writing as a practice, a lifestyle, a career. Books on [...]

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Some Empirically Verified Cautions

Saturday, June 25, 2011

(1. Do not boil cucumbers. Ever. (2. Do not leave sharp cheddar cheese in a ziplock bag in a moist, warm environment for even a few hours. (3. Do not overspice your chicken curry. (4. Do not attempt marathon sessions of Hegel: slow and steady wins that race. (5. Do not drink scotch directly before [...]

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A Scattershot Update On Me, Myself, and I

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Notes on me, my life and times this month, and the stuff going on in my head — skip this post and wait for more of the usual extrospection, tomorrow, all ye less than morbidly interested. 1. Books. Something of an orgy of them, actually, a spending of hoarded up book money from the last [...]

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On Fractures In Churches and Leftists

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The two groups most renowned for fractiousness — the tendency to imitate the sex life of an amoeba — are probably churches and the far left. Consider, for example, baptists and trotskyists (two groups comprised and comprising of fractures). The specificity of their names already indicates that their self-definition emerges from critical distinctions between some [...]

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