literature items › MachineMachine /stream

Link The culture of the copy by James Panero…

Technological revolutions are far less obvious than political revolutions to the generations that live through them. This is true even as new tools, for better and worse, shift human history…

January 22 2013, 3:27pm | Comments

Link Roger Scruton – A culture of fake originality

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. High…

January 22 2013, 5:16am | Comments

Twitter Links Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain

What is the genesis of Funes the Memorious, the Jorge Luis Borges story about a mnemonist that fascinates neuroscientists, and is as famed a…

November 11 2012, 9:23pm | Comments

Metafilter The Library of Babel in 140 characters (or fewer) The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI,…

October 27 2012, 9:15am | Comments

Link Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks…

June 15 2012, 5:29am | Comments

Link War and Peace ebook readers find a surprise…

A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version…

June 15 2012, 5:23am | Comments

Link In the Digital Era, Publication Isn’t Preservation

Publication used to mean preservation but it no longer does. Let me explain. When a print book is published its metadata is literally attached to its content. The author and…

May 21 2012, 10:46am | Comments

Link The Trouble with Scientism

The conflict between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften goes back at least two centuries, and became intensified as ambitious, sometimes impatient researchers proposed to introduce natural scientific concepts and methods…

May 17 2012, 3:42am | Comments

Link Post-Digitalism and Contemporary Spanish Fiction

Postdigital literature is not centered in code, but in addressing a reality shaped by a mix of coded/uncoded reality – German Sierra (german_sierra)

April 30 2012, 10:48am | Comments

Twitter Links When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?

It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up.…

April 29 2012, 2:07pm | Comments

Link Jonathan Lethem on our rapidly dematerializing culture

The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet,…

April 26 2012, 12:43pm | Comments

Link Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of…

RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided…

April 21 2012, 5:37am | Comments

Metafilter A Database of Metaphor The Mind is a Metaphor. A database of thousands of metaphors organized by category, like 18th century, Liquid, or Jacobite. It's maintained by University of Virginia English Professor…

March 27 2012, 7:06pm | Comments

Twitter Links Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible" The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature.…

March 21 2012, 9:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart

Last year alone, the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours. Just a decade ago, computer professionals spoke of kilobytes…

March 11 2012, 4:12am | Comments

Twitter Links Philip K. Dick - Worlds out of Joint - 1st international conference

2012 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the untimely death, at the age of 53, of Philip K. Dick – a figure whose cultural impact…

March 9 2012, 2:48am | Comments

Link The Exegete

When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as…

March 4 2012, 5:22am | Comments

Twitter Links Philip K. Dick : To the best of our KNOWLEDGE

“I wanted to write books exactly like the ones he didn't live long enough to write.” Lethem on Philip K. Dick

March 4 2012, 1:35am | Comments

Twitter Links The Exegesis of Philip K Dick with Erik Davis

“March 3 and March 4: Philip K. Dick is undoubtedly one of the greatest Gnostic visionaries and literary giants in all of history. Much…

March 3 2012, 12:05pm | Comments

Twitter Links Life after Papyrus: The Swerve

Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of…

February 17 2012, 5:05am | Comments

Twitter Links E-books Can't Burn

E-books Can't Burn: Could it be that ebooks bring us closer to the Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability…

February 16 2012, 3:50pm | Comments

Twitter Links Worth a new Mass?

How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?

December 8 2011, 7:06am | Comments

Link Tom McCarthy: My desktop

I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but…

November 27 2011, 9:34am | Comments

Link The Millions : "I would prefer not to"…

I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it…

October 16 2011, 11:38am | Comments

Link Zombie Editions: An Archaeology of POD Areopagiticas

This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable…

October 16 2011, 9:06am | Comments

Link Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?

But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up…

October 16 2011, 7:04am | Comments

Metafilter Crusoe film adaptations and *that* footprint Robinson Crusoe film adaptations. Which are the best ones? Also, that footprint... For a project I am working on, I want to isolate the moment in Robinson Crusoe…

September 29 2011, 5:31am | Comments

Link Reading Life - What We Do to Books

There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers)…

August 30 2011, 8:32am | Comments

Link Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or…

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in…

July 25 2011, 2:46am | Comments

Twitter Links The Monster Ate Vegetables

It’s surprising that Mary Shelley would make her horrible Monster a vegetarian. Surprising, because we think we know our monsters well. We’ve looked at…

July 13 2011, 2:26am | Comments

Tumblr Ubik: Philip K. Dick

July 12 2011, 1:39am | Comments

Link Friday, by Michel Tournier

French writer, who gained fame at the age of forty-three with his first novel, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967, Friday; or, The Other Island), an ingenious reworking of…

July 5 2011, 9:36am | Comments

Link How to survive the age of distraction

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the…

June 25 2011, 5:21am | Comments

Link The Things, by Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being…

June 20 2011, 5:13am | Comments

Metafilter New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation.…

June 19 2011, 5:29am | Comments

Link First ever direct English translation of Solaris published

The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and…

June 16 2011, 3:07pm | Comments

Link Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.…

June 15 2011, 8:50am | Comments

Link Georges Bataille Electronic Library

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

June 1 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Tumblr We by Evgeny Zamyatin: Images from Other Worlds

May 16 2011, 3:02am | Comments

Video

May 15 2011, 3:29am | Comments

Link Technology Of Writing

Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

May 11 2011, 11:03am | Comments

Wikipedia Alien space bats Alien space bats (ASBs) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to create a point of divergence that would otherwise be implausible. [edit]Definition "Alien space…

May 3 2011, 12:27pm | Comments

Link The Font of the Hand

JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De…

March 24 2011, 5:23pm | Comments

Link Prop Theory in a Nutshell

Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game –…

March 10 2011, 9:31am | Comments

Link Zooming Out: How Writers Create Our Visual Grammar

Maybe you’re young enough to remember Blue’s Clues, or old enough to have a little one hanging on the mystery-solving adventures of Steve and Blue as you read this. If,…

March 8 2011, 9:41am | Comments

Link The lost art of editing

But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production…

February 15 2011, 3:32am | Comments

Link 400 years of the King James Bible

The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated…

February 11 2011, 3:43am | Comments

Link Narcissus Regards a Book

Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority…

February 1 2011, 3:26pm | Comments

Link The Novel is not under threat from technology

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The…

January 10 2011, 3:34am | Comments

Link Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You

It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism…

January 6 2011, 8:17pm | Comments

Link When new narratives meet old brains

We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating "We are our…

November 25 2010, 8:29am | Comments

Link Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting…

November 13 2010, 3:58pm | Comments

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