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 The Atlantic:
the Atlantic featured another essay, by Nicholas Carr, called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer was an emphatic, if not altogether wistful, “Yes.”
Nicholas Carr1
From the LA Times:
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.”
Beau Friedlander2
NOTES:
1) Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,”July/August 2008, The Atlantic, accessed November 10, 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
2) Beau Friedlander, “The Net effect,” Nov. 9, 2008, Los Angeles Times, accessed November 10, 2008, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-nov-09-ca-gutenberg9-story.html
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
Blogging grows up
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.
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast: episode 2
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Reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s piece in the American Poetry Review.
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Off to run some morning errands.
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Listening to a lecture on Classical Mythology, and still pondering a question about Pollack.
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Pollack. I’m thinking about Pollack tonight.
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“Late one night, sorrow come round/ Scratchin’ at my door… ” Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
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Back home from a full, energetic evening class.
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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.
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In a meeting about podcasting and multimedia whatnot.
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Route 8, running hot. Route 6, minutes late. Route 28 on time. Still made it to the office before the meeting.
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Off to the bus stop to brave the October blizzard.
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Flurries (that means snow to Southern states).
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From iTunes: “Dear Podcast Owner: Your podcast… has been approved. You should expect to see it in iTunes within the next few hours.”
Coffeehouse Junkie Podcast
The first weekly Coffeehouse Junkie podcast has been submitted to Apple iTunes.
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Podcast successfully submitted to iTunes.
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Waiting for RSS validating
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Coding XML podcast file and uploading mp3 to web server.
Coffeehouse Junkie 