writing items › MachineMachine /stream

Wikipedia Betteridge's law of headlines Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after…

June 2 2013, 6:54am | Comments

Tumblr Pyramid Schemes

May 6 2013, 3:31pm | Comments

Link The Hendrick's Lecture Series

WILLIAM BURROUGHS and the TORSO MURDERER with Oliver Harris William Burroughs writes "...in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when…

February 4 2013, 3:25am | Comments

Link A vested interest in palimpsest

The English language contains certain meaning-rich words that command attention and stir controversy. “Paradigm,” for instance: When Thomas Kuhn used it in 1966 to describe accepted scientific theories, and gave…

December 20 2012, 3:45am | Comments

Link The Object is Always Magic: Narrative as Collection

The lesson here is this: stories come from fragment and from ellipsis. At the same time I got the glass eyeballs I was collecting junk. Mostly what I collected was…

December 14 2012, 3:00am | Comments

Wikipedia Titivillus Titivillus was a demon said to work on behalf of Belphegor, Lucifer or Satan to introduce errors into the work of scribes. The first reference to Titivillus by…

July 13 2012, 1:00am | 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 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 'Will reading in the digital era erode our…

Quite the opposite, so long as we grasp the fresh routes to knowledge, and connection, that technological change brings, says Nick Harkaway. These are old, old fears in a new…

May 17 2012, 3:38am | 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

Twitter Links The Making of The Rings of Saturn

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was already in his fiftieth year, and his third decade of residence…

April 5 2012, 3:02am | Comments

Metafilter What is the Folk Web? I'm looking for 'Folk' Web Cultures. I am thinking of the recent take-down of Geocities, which seemed to refresh people's love of the naff, kitsch aesthetic it was…

April 4 2012, 6:41am | 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 Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph and the dystopian sci-fi rut.

Should sci-fi be less dystopian and more upbeat? What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz,…

March 23 2012, 5:07am | 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 Borges: The Task of Art

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Findings Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures And The Loss of Inscription

by Marcos Novak To inscribe is to write in, to place the mark of one thing within the fabric of another. Carving is the prototypical kind of inscription, though every other kind of writing partakes in this modification…

March 16 2012, 7:31am | Comments

Twitter Links Crazy Friend by Jonathan Lethem

Where Philip K. Dick had come from, for me, was my best friend’s Jake’s dad, Harry. Harry was younger than Jake’s mom, and when…

March 12 2012, 12:50am | Comments

Twitter Links Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?

Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most…

March 11 2012, 5:35am | Comments

Twitter Links How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author's real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ.…

March 4 2012, 10:05am | 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 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 Hacking Critical Theory

My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will…

February 17 2012, 12:35am | Comments

Metafilter Digital Images are SomeThing to aspire to? (A reflection… Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of…

February 16 2012, 5:13am | Comments

Twitter Links Never go with a cultist to a second location

On HP Lovecraft: Alex Fitch talks to Alan Moore about his final graphic novel that isn’t part of the continuing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…

December 18 2011, 2:05am | Comments

Twitter Links All Language Is Murder

Americans love people who kill people. We don’t want to say it that way, and we don’t want to be killed ourselves (most of…

December 14 2011, 2:50am | 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 VideoGames can't tell stories

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.…

November 24 2011, 2:53am | 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

Link Music moved on after modernism, but whatever happened…

The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the…

October 12 2011, 9:54am | Comments

Link Innovation Starvation

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer)…

October 2 2011, 4:47am | Comments

Metafilter Innovative websites as template for MFA research community I'm looking for examples of websites that have successfully enhanced a research community (academic or artistic) with a dynamic online/social/mutual-portfolio presence. Blog and social media based hubs, perhaps,…

September 16 2011, 7:26am | Comments

Twitter Links Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy

The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting that things will get worse. But while avoiding the…

September 4 2011, 6:12pm | 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

Portfolio A Labyrinth (No Minotaur)

August 26 2011, 12:03pm | Comments

Twitter Links How to write faster. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

Slowpoke: How to be a faster writer (or 'how to write faster') - http://t.co/MCpEcFZ #science #writing #x #slate

August 12 2011, 9:11am | 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

Portfolio Thoughts on art practice PhDs

July 21 2011, 2:58am | Comments

Link Off-putting behaviour: On Writing and Procrastination

When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God's sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive…

July 8 2011, 1:52am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

“All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.” - Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

July 4 2011, 11:02am | 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

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

Miscellanous Projects Digital Autonomy

June 11 2011, 4:02am | Comments

Link Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for…

While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on…

June 6 2011, 1:36pm | Comments

Link Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why…

Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend…

June 2 2011, 1:19pm | Comments

Link Are Artists Liars?

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be…

June 2 2011, 3:55am | 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

Link Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to…

May 30 2011, 2:03am | Comments

Link Depicting Relationships: The limits of language

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit…

May 29 2011, 3:28pm | Comments

Metafilter GIF Archaeology I'm writing a paper on (animated) GIFs and am trying to track down some of the most (in)famous. I suppose I am talking memes, but I'm more interested…

May 16 2011, 8:17am | Comments