// the inbox still has 80-something unanswered emails. if you emailed me in the last week, please be patient. i will reply.
// web ad done. working on weekly planner book and a full page ad.
// heard this on NYT Book Review podcast… of the 15,000 fiction and poetry published this year only 320 are translation
The old network media complex is dead
From Ad Age:
The winners were the ones that fed the public’s desire for news where and when they wanted it: 24-hour cable TV news; participatory blogs that aggregate news of a political bent; websites that allow users to access media on their own terms (YouTube) and those that allow users to communicate and organize with each other (Facebook).
I’m not sure whether to rejoice or weep.
Nietzsche wrote that “the mediocre are combining to make themselves masters…” and the unintended consequences of this power shift is “tyranny of the least and dumbest.”
For context, Renate Wood writes (regarding Nietzsche’s idea) that the intellectual community’s “contempt for the newly literate masses and the shallowness and vulgarity of the literature…” is well documented.
T.S. Eliot referred to the readers of the growing mass media culture as “complacent, prejudiced and unthinking.”
In light of the recent American election cycle I perplexed.
Google make you stupider
From the LA Times:
the Atlantic featured another essay, by Nicholas Carr, called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer was an emphatic, if not altogether wistful, “Yes.”
I didn’t read the article, but I googled it. Here’s the link (now I really feel stupider). Further:
In theory, a tool like Google should free us to be more creative. In reality, there are pitfalls…. the open-endedness of an Internet where “you can imagine knowledge and then find it.” But there is a downside, which, according to Frel, is rather dire: “Pretty good has become the new perfection.”
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn memorized passages of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” he had no choice but to enact the modernist version of oral traditions. This was not an expression of collective culture so much as an extreme example of what T.S. Eliot called “the individual talent.”
Today’s blogs are a mutation of Solzhenitsyn’s modernist mythmaking — where the merely personal becomes a matter of permanent record. Increasingly, mainstream writers cite blogs. Political journalists use them as sources. According to CommonSenseMedia.org, 74% of journalists recently surveyed regularly read blogs, and 84% “say they would or already have used blogs as a primary or secondary source for articles.”
(No, I didn’t read the rest of the LA Times article. Blame it on adult ADHD or the fact that I have six windows open in my browser and I’m getting really hungry and the caffeine from this morning’s latte finally wore off…)
it may be that blogs will become the new (acceptable) “personal” genre for Poets who Think
Oxford compiles list of top ten irritating phrases
1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science
I was engaging in a dubious art form that has no audience.
I read a poem at a coffeehouse last night and watched the audience’s eyes glaze. So, when I read this I smiled. » read essay @ globel life
In essence, [blogging/blog platforms are] a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions.
Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.
Poet lands book deal with major publisher
From TwinCities.com:
Success didn’t come without hard work for Boss, a former St. Paulite who lives in the White Bear Lake area.
He sent poems to Poetry magazine for 15 years before it accepted one. During one “desperate time” in his busy life, he wrote from 2 to 4 a.m., then went back to bed until 6 a.m.
Boss describes himself as a folk poet whose work is accessible.
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast: episode 2
// Reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s piece in the American Poetry Review.
// Off to run some morning errands.
From the Guardian:
UbuWeb, the magnificent – and enormous – archive of the avant garde has, in one of its many curious corners, an online project glorying in the name Publishing the Unpublishable.
It’s not a great year
Doubleday Publishing Lays Off 10% of Its Employees – NYTimes.com (via fluffynotes)
// Listening to a lecture on Classical Mythology, and still pondering a question about Pollack.
// Pollack. I’m thinking about Pollack tonight.
// “Late one night, sorrow come round/ Scratchin’ at my door… ” Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast
// Back home from a full, energetic evening class.
// Someone in the meeting told me I’m not suppose to miniblog a meeting in which I’m supposed to be paying attention to said meeting.
Coffeehouse Junkie 