First Vonnegut, and now this. L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorite books.
I often remind my students that, despite their belief that they have important knowledge to communicate to the world at large through their poetry, their status as poets already suggests that they have failed to make any momentous discovery that might have otherwise contributed to the history of knowledge; otherwise, the students might have exploited this insight in far more lucrative vocations, like the sciences or even business. I remind my students that they are probably taking my class in poetry because “math is hard” — and since they have no other worthy skills, they have chosen to accept their demotion to a lowly caste of literate nobodies. I get a few nervous giggles from the students after these waggish tirades — but then I underline my argument by saying that, if students really do believe that they are communicating, heretofore undiscovered, revelations to the public, then the proper genre for transmitting such a discovery is definitely not a poem, but a press conference….
Ouch. I had this conversation the other day while interviewing a theatre critic who also writes plays. I asked him if it was true that those who can’t write about those who can. He told me he didn’t believe that at all. I guess I could be back in theatre if I wanted to — in a different interview last week, someone tried to rope me into submitted the one play I’ve written to a playwriting competition. (via The Mumpsimus)
Jeff Jarvis (via peterwknox)
Like going from LP albums to jewel cases, Rolling Stone’s new smaller format just won’t have as much room for personality as the old one did.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
"The Wire’s David Simon, writing in his article In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police
Michael Spencer, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, on the coming evangelical collapse.
What a manifestly stupid thing to do.
Great, detailed analysis here from a local (Lexington, Ky.-based) blogger about the decline and mismanagement of Lexmark and how the company’s worth basically a tenth of what it was worth five years ago. It’s ultimately a very sad story, since Lexmark is one of our biggest local employers.
Clay Shirky writing in his blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. This is only a small snippet of a long, thoughtful, depressing, and ultimately hopeful analysis of the huge changes the Internet is forcing on newspapers and book publishers.
Julie Trelstad, commenting on this blog post about the continuing downturn in publishing. As the dot-com bubble and the resulting credit bubble continue to work their ways out of our economic system, hopefully traditional media enterprises (like book publishing) can find a way to regain their equilibrium. (via fluffynotes)
We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.
National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.
"Richard Rodriguez writes a haunting obituary about the death of American newspapers — and, by extension, the soul of America itself. (via)
This is very, very sad news. With most newspaper book critics gone and Kirkus now shuttered, the traditional review landscape is looking very sparse indeed. (via Daring Fireball)
