Ten Reasons Why

From a New York Times Magazine interview with Umberto Eco:

I am wondering if you read Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” which some critics see as the pop version of your “Name of the Rose.”

I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.

But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel.

No, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Point Umberto!
I’ve frequently said that The Da Vinci Code is a dumbed-down knock-off of Foucault’s Pendulum. I’m glad Eco agrees.

Books, Writing & Literature

Back in 1986, I got introduced to Don DeLillo in a contemporary American literature class through his National Book Award-winning novel, . DeLillo is still one of my favorite American novelists (although I’ve enjoyed his recent work less than his novels from the 80’s and 90’s), and White Noise is one of those books that I re-read every few years, just for the hell of it. I own several copies of it, but the favorite copy is the original white-covered Penguin edition I bought for that contemporary American lit class back in ‘86. It has margin notes scrawled in it from the course, and again from several years later when I made White Noise part of the focus of my Master’s thesis. And some margin notes from when I taught it to my own students.

I taught White Noise in my own literature courses at least four times, alway somewhat disappointed that the vast majority of my students weren’t as blow away by it as I was (and many were actually violently put off by DeLillo’s highly stylized prose). More to the point, after I began to focus more on teaching composition & rhetoric than literature, I used an excerpt from White Noise — the oft-excerpted “Most Photographed Barn in America” scene — as a writing prompt in many more composition/rhetoric courses.

Imagine my delight then when this morning I read (via Kottke) a blog post that points out the combination of Flickr with mapping functionality that allows you to “theoretically pick any place in the world — a city, a neighborhood, a street corner, a building, and literally view that place through the lenses of the people who had photographed that place” means that we can now look at the actual Most Photographed Barn in America.

Still . . . the presence of the Rockies in the background makes me think that maybe this isn’t in proximity to the idyllic College-on-the-Hill, and maybe Jack and Murray are still standing on that elevated spot looking at the signs of another barn. Ah . . . what’s the differance? ;-)

Books, Writing & Literature, Photography

Ray Kurzweil, a well-known inventor, has received a patent (NY Times, free registration required) for software that creates poetry by reading poems, learning the style of the poet, and imitating it.
It’s probably a bit more complex than that, and the results are likely underwhelming as poetry (the example in the article certainly is), but what I’m more interested in the potential impact of providing a software patent (which are dodgy patents anyway) on the computerization of common artistic practices.
Can the patent holders litigate against human students of poetics for patent infringement if those students create poems by reading and imitating the style of existing poets?!? Think of the repercussions on graduate creative writing programs!

Books, Writing & Literature, Intellectual Property

Fun: One word. So little time.

Books, Writing & Literature

I’m in the process of weeding out the detritus of my life, which includes digging through various files (Do I really need this 1996 phone bill from four phone numbers ago? What if the FBI decides I’m really an international terrorist, and I need to prove that I was living in a group house in Adams Morgan back then?!?), opening boxes that I packed four years ago (There’s the damn printer cable!), and deciding what to do with pictures of ex-girlfriends (no comment).
One of the more enjoyable parts of this has been scouring a bunch of ancient 3.5″ floppies discovered in a box and finding digital copies (in WordPerfect 5.1 for Unix format, no less!) of most of my creative and professional writing from the early- to mid-nineties.
Just to demonstrate I’ve been thinking about this computer stuff for quite some time now, I’ll share this one gem from my archeological dig: an essay I wrote back in 1994 on the impact of computers on writing and literacy titled “Hyperliteracy: Envisioning a Literacy for the Information Age.” Here’s a blurb:

Computer technologies provide a means to circumvent the linear limitations of the print medium when writing, but, for the most part, they have not been used in this fashion–either by writers or by teachers. On the contrary, most computer-based writing environments attempt to extend the conventions of the print medium into the electronic medium, imposing print standards on a non-print form.

I wish I could say that this is a brilliant piece of critical work in computers and composition, but it’s pretty much just a grad student essay (toward a second Master’s degree that I never finished), complete with the requisite Derrida reference.
Though it’s somewhat naive and over-researched, it’s not without merit (and was required reading in at least one graduate course). From a historical vantage, it’s interesting that the assumptions of that particular point in computers and writing research (which perhaps are not clear from the essay alone) were pretty far off. E.g. much of the buzz ten to fifteen years ago was about the heuristic possibilities of computers as writing tools, most of which never panned out. I remember using tools like Norton Connect (which appears to be defunct) and the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (which is apparently still alive and released a new version a few months ago!) in my writing classrooms.
Instead, I believe today that computer technology is starting to, and likely will, revolutionize writing through erasure of the costs of reproduction and distribution, not through software that teaches us to be better writers. Provide a better medium for writing (i.e. cheaper, faster, wider in audience), and we’ll find ways to be better writers.
Besides, it’s kind of fun to look back and remember the excitement with which I was approaching the much more nascent field back then.
Read the whole thing: Hyperliteracy: Envisioning a Literacy for the Information Age

Books, Writing & Literature

Amazon World is a weblog that re-publishes humorous (and just plain sad) Amazon.com reader reviews of well-known titles.

Books, Writing & Literature

Last week I ruminated publicly (which is basically what one does in a weblog, duh) about writing fiction in public, as opposed to just ruminatin’ .
The idea’s been knocking around in my head ever since. Tonight I got around to doing a Google search for “blog novel serial.” Lo and behold, there’s a growing number of serialized novels presented via blogs. Just a few:

• American Invisible
• Plan B
• Agent to the Stars
• The Invisible Woman

I haven’t done more than peruse the table of contents of these, so I can’t attest to the quality of these attempts. But it has my gears turning — weblogs seem like an excellent medium for the serialization of a novel.
Hey, it worked for Dickens. :-)

Books, Writing & Literature

Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:

“We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction.”

Amen, brother.
I certainly don’t keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It’s like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)
However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.
You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don’t do much writing these days. I’ve often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public — not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.
Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn’t solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.
Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)

Books, Writing & Literature, Education, Personal, Weblogs

Shakespeare was born today in 1564. By best estimates, that is. There’s no record of his birth, but there is record of his baptism on April 26, 1564.
As a former English prof, I salute you, Billy S.! :-)

Books, Writing & Literature

Steven Johnson, author of has a weblog.
I just finished reading Emergence last week. Terrific book. Highly recommended. Now I’m looking forward to drilling through six months of his weblog archives….

Books, Writing & Literature, Weblogs