Tag: What I’m Reading
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Adam Savage on the Internet: “The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their…
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I’m reading E.B. White’s Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale. First, I’ll read the introduction by Dale. Rebecca Dale worked on an independent study project at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988, where she read all of E.B. White’s New Yorker work. This book is a result of collecting many pieces…
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Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Why They Wrote Deep Space and Sacred Time: “…we were faced with the universal parental problem of how passively we should admit media fantasies into our family’s cultural life.” At family dinners, they’d find themselves disassembling favorite television shows “to see how they ‘work’ both as pleasure-giving entertainment and…
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I’m digging into Culture Crash, the killing of the creative class, by the late Scott Timberg. One of his early points: We are often caught in the shockwave of current events, if we are so unfortunate to be caught in the wake of their aftermath. This is why I’ve made the conscious choice to remain…
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I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them. … From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow: On Academics : “Academics, even those describing…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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On Strawberries: “In material fact, Strawberries belong only to themselves. The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were…
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This isn’t Carl Sagan’s best book, but it was his last, and it has plenty of good stuff to say. … Chapter 5 is about “Four Cosmic Questions” 1st cosmic question: “Was there ever life on Mars?” 2nd cosmic question: “Is Titan a laboratory for the origins of life?” 3rd cosmic question: “Is there intelligent…
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With “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman has written the kind of book where every couple sentences you stop and think. I could literally study this book one or two sentences at a time. These are the kinds of books that I want to write. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I will say…
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Emmelie Arents of Prose and Petticoats had a good video on Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor. I’ve never really gotten into Scott. This sounds like a difficult novel. I like these videos because I think having even a general awareness of these classics is important. I don’t even remember what Ivanhoe was about way…