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Monthly Archives: July 2011

On Dismissing Anders Behring Breivick

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Like many others, I’ve downloaded and perused Breivik’s handbook on anti-multi-culti-ism, anti-Islam, how to stay focused and self-indoctrinated while working solo to plan and perpetrate a massacre, and the absurd but terrifying Knights Templar. People should be reading the manifesto. Not out of prurient interest in the private life of a psychopath (though there’s plenty [...]

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On The Globalization of Civil Society and Mass Culture

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Amid the regular cries of those who deplore the increased generational absorption in an “online” world, it must also be said that the internet offers us the best hope for short cutting the long, hard, but necessary work of establishing a global civil society. For my part any de-provincialization I have experienced was largely a [...]

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On Scrivener

Monday, July 18, 2011

Scrivener is a program for writers originally built for the Mac platform. I have a PC, but fortunately there’s a beta version for windows. (And in August of this year a formal licensed version will be released for windows.) It’s a remarkable program. You create a “project” and within that project you can create any [...]

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On The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Friday, July 15, 2011

Since I promised to review Grossman’s The Magician King, it only seems right to throw a few notes out about his previous book. Grossman’s book has a reputation as the Harry Potter for grown-ups and literary people. Certainly he is a better stylist than Rowling and far more comfortable with the sexuality, depression, addictions, and [...]

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On Joining Google+

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Months ago I left facebook, tired of being spied on by friends and family, and tired of receiving informal facebook messages from people whose correspondence I would prefer to have received at my gmail account. I also disliked Facebook’s info gathering techniques, by means of the “like” buttons that have overrun the web like breeding [...]

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On Political Confessionalism

Thursday, July 14, 2011

(H/t Garry Wills @ NYRB for connecting some dots.) In the fairly immediate aftermath of the Protestant reformation, a stage of western christian church history began that is known as “confessionalism.” Basically, everybody with a dog in the fight scrambled to assemble their institutional intellectuals, in good early church council style, and wrote up a [...]

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On Why Reading About Writing Is Not Bad For You

Thursday, July 7, 2011

A reader wrote me to say, I read your article on a list of books about writing well. Don’t you think getting into that kind of reading will ultimately just distract an aspiring writer from getting things done? I think I understand the worry. Just as philosophers who do nothing but meta-philosophy, lingering back permanently [...]

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