fiction - Taryn . on Diigo

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

an experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. The project went live on Monday 10 November 2008. It’s part of a long-term effort to encourage and enable a culture of collaborative learning. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.

Tags: fiction, literature, online_learning, women, doris_lessing on 2008-11-16 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (1) -About

in list: watch for responses

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A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel'

Tags: literature, short_story, fiction, lit_crit, book_review, borges, math, philosophy on 2008-10-30 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (5) -About

more fromwww.nysun.com

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if:book: Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism

Tags: fiction, literature, history, new_historicism, stephen_greenblatt, lit_crit, shakespeare on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (5) -About

more fromwww.futureofthebook.org

Greenblatt has the power of reading closely, even if he doesn't read closely in the same way his mentors did; he still reads with "the rigor and excitement of the old New Critics." Henderson added that this historical moment is an excellent time for criticism, since "attention to detail and method is very important with a glut of information."
the importance of thinking inside a text, rather than removing the text from its context (as in New Criticism).
referring to the difference between New Historicism (a term Greenblatt himself coined for examining a text within the framework of history, culture, and sociology) and Cultural Materialism, a term for a branch of literary criticism stemming from Marxism that looks at a text not as an object, but as a process that is both politicized and historigraphical.
Henderson added that the great question, then, was how to use history to tell a story. At the moment that New Historicism emerged, it put the individual back into the system (as opposed to high theory and Cultural Materialism). It was about America in individual lives.
As a scholar, Greenblatt advised, decide when you have to cut yourself off; later you may know more but won't end up saying much more. You have to know when to stop. He said he had to learn for himself and his students to be responsible, but not to be so obsessive or so frightened. You must shape around the idea that you have a story to tell, for yourself and your readers.

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OnFiction: Research Bulletin: Entertainment as Play

don't bother signing up for 30-day access. Abstract here: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a791600399~db=all~order=page

Tags: psychology, film, art, fiction, emotion, play, evolution on 2008-10-21 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Malcolm Gladwell

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Tags: creativity, prodigy, art, painting, writing, fiction, interview on 2008-10-14 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (15) -About

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they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.
An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
“More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.
If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara”—the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. “I mean, it was nothing,” Foer said. “I had absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up.” Total time spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.
B
Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso,
But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons.

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Writers urged by ex-poet laureate to defend wildlife

Tags: writing, fiction, climate_crisis, social_change, evolution on 2008-10-07 -All Annotations (1) -About

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The Grunge American Novel

Tags: literature, fiction, publishing_industry, marketing, book_review, writer, david_foster_wallace, 1990s on 2008-10-05 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? - Features, Books - The Independent

see conversation with Kevin Kelly and Sven Bikerts

Tags: literacy, reading, literature, academia, fiction, e-books, publishing_industry, interview on 2008-09-16 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (13) -About

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Michael Bhaskar's follow up: http://thedigitalist.net/?p=231

"...188 million blogs seems to curl the lips and spike the arrogance of those who can’t see that this is now part of the writosphere as much as scribbling sestinas and neo-Freudian meditations on childhood.

Creative writing is as much about tweeting and posting on blogs as anything; or if not then it will be, or at least, if writers accept the challenge, could be."
post by taryn930 on 2008-09-25

Birkerts found that, as watchers of TV and videos, "they had difficulty
slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; they had
problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with
vocabulary that seemed 'pretentious'; they were especially uncomfortable
with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight
plot; and they were put off by an ironic tone, because it flaunted
superiority and made them feel they were missing something." It dawned
on Birkerts that a whole generation of young American readers were becoming
gradually decoupled from the whole culture of the written word.
Twenty-five years ago,
when the Amis-Barnes-Rushdie generation was getting under way, readers
seemed to have no problem ' being steered towards experimental,
inward-looking, linguistically challenging fiction. Flaubert's Parrot sold
well, despite its metafictional games with biography, as did Amis's Money,
despite its torrentially exhausting Amer-English prose style. Graham Swift's
Waterland, now on school English syllabuses, flew out of bookshops in its
Picador paperback livery, as did One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Midnight's Children.

Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal; "difficult"
novels don't sell. Adam Mars-Jones's massive, and beautifully-written novel
Pilcrow, published earlier this year, sold only a few hundred copies, and
there have been several similar casualties. Although, traditionally, every
Booker winner invariably becomes a world bestseller, the 2008 winner, Anne
Enright's The Gathering, made the briefest appearance in the top 10 before
disappearing.
To sell now, books evidently need to be big on plot and incident, short on
interior monologue – the sort of titles that the Richard & Judy
Book Club strenuously promotes. "Most literary programmes, which are on
late at night and concerned with 'literature', intimidate lots of people,"
said Judy Finnegan last year. "For some, that a book has been
Booker-nominated is actually a turn-off." Can this, then, be the future
of reading: an increasing number of low-brow, plot-driven works will flood
the market, consigning works of literary merit to a watery grave, while the
low-brows vie with each other for the attention of readers so badly affected
by the moving stream of internet info-processing, that they can no longer
focus their attention for longer than a few pages?
The instructions tell you, "One battery charge is equal to 6,800 page
turns (that's enough to read War and Peace five times over on a single
charge!)" Yeah, right. But it's not going to happen on the Sony Reader.
Nobody is ever going to read Tolstoy on this fatuous device. It's an
electronic simulation of a page, but it'll never convince you it's a book,
to be read by your sentient eyes and brain. It doesn't have the solidity,
the pages, the tactile companionship of a book. You'll never know where you
are in the story, or how much of it is left. You won't have the cover
artwork, to steal inside your head and become a lifelong reminder of the
book it encased.

And you can't turn the pages. I spent half an hour reading Agatha Christie's
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the first book to be installed) with my fingers
itching to turn a page; "turn" one electronically, and the screen
goes blank before the next page is displayed. It's a nasty moment, the
screen going blank and interrupting your train of thought; but it's a good
metaphor for the blankness to which our minds are tending, as we gradually
lose the ability to interpret the old world of sequential thoughts in the
new blizzard of information retrieval.
Add Sticky Note
- pfft. the dramatics.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16
The agent : Clare Alexander
Add Sticky Note
- doesn't get it
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16
Our reading rooms are still as busy as ever: the most high-quality
digitisation does not replace the power of seeing the original artefact.
However, people are now more aware of what we've got
The publisher: Jeremy Ettinghausen

"Penguin is the publisher that invented the paperback: innovation is in
our DNA.
"Could you compare a blog or a story told via Twitter to Dickens? Well,
Dickens wrote in soap opera-like episodes. It's always easier to decide
where the cultural action has been, but hard to spot it at the time. These
things are happening and we need to adjust."
"Their interest is in the books reviewed in the broadsheets and the ones
that win the Booker. Their ambition is to be on sale in high-street
bookshops and published in book form by a mainstream publisher. That is, to
them, a badge, because it measures the value of their writing against the
writing they admire.

"Ahead of this interview, I talked to them about digitisation and not one
of them had heard of Twitter, and they were all hostile to the idea of
e-books.

"They're not immersed in digital fiction, either – some have been
published online, but feel it's second-best; they're concerned about the
lack of editorial control on the Net and only pursue it because there is a
dearth of [print] outlets for short stories.
Add Sticky Note
- crappy personalities
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-09-16

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James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Tags: writer, publishing_industry, novel, children, fiction on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Digital Technology and English Pedagogy

The authors suggest the web project serves as a possible example of a transitional pedagogy where two ways of organizing and presenting information — of writing — are used simultaneously and toward mutually enhancing ends.

Tags: literature, fiction, writing, reading, education, teaching, learning on 2008-08-28 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromkairos.technorhetoric.net

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thedigitalist.net » Short Fiction in the Age of the Ebook

Tags: fiction, reading, e-books on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

Tags: fiction, literature, publishing_industry, publishing, e-books, interactive_graphic, written_for_the_web on 2008-08-27 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Letters - It’s Why We Read, Online and Off

Re “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” (“The Future of Reading” series, front page, July 27):

Tags: reading, literature, fiction, education, opinion on 2008-08-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?

Tags: reading, education, literature, fiction, testing, teaching on 2008-07-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
Add Sticky Note
- the problem is the curriculum will inevitably become outdated, and probably very quickly.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
Add Sticky Note
- what's onine
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages.

James Wood's How Fiction Works. - By Judith Shulevitz - Slate Magazine

Tags: fiction, literature, criticism, lit_crit, book_review, james_wood on 2008-07-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

Tags: literature, fiction, italy, sicily, novel, book_review on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Make AI and virtual world technologies accessible to artists so that they can create the future of immersive story entertainment | TapBot

intriguing, not necessarily interesting. suspect digital native divide

Tags: fiction, immersive_story, writing, art, application on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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'Atmospheric Disturbances,' by Rivka Galchen - Review

It's obviously capgras syndrome. Richard Powers did something like it...."Everyday calamity of the lessening of love", "science fiction". Ack. This is why it is important to ignore book reviews.

Tags: book_review, fiction, fourth_culture, science_in_fiction, women on 2008-07-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

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The American Scholar - The Art of Surprise - By Steve Vineberg

Tags: art, literature, fiction, film, theater on 2008-07-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.theamericanscholar.org

compelled to read, re-read and see everything prof. vineberg alludes to
post by taryn930 on 2008-07-10

the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by “unpredictable” isn’t the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shmalayan’s movies) but the turn you don’t expect just because it’s so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, “Of course.”
At the other end of the spectrum is the kind of art that sermonizes, that reduces life to definitives and platitudes, that claims to know precisely how everyone should have acted—and I believe that it’s thoroughly, inherently false. When it comes in the form of drama, it generally wins the Pulitzer Prize or the Tony Award or both
Bad writers and directors of the kind I’ve alluded to always want to offer us the easy way out—the lie that we’re superior to the characters on the stage or the screen; put another way, they create false, two-dimensional characters we can only feel superior to.
It’s the genuine artists who bind us to great sinners like Lear and Othello—or more likely, in modern art, to petty sinners, who throw their lives away for pride or spite or else carelessly, without thinking about it, and then realize, too late, what they’ve done.
the artist’s creation of emotion out of the raw material of experience is a moral act because it puts us in touch with what makes us human
The cheap ironic pose of much contemporary art and entertainment teaches us to be cynical when we’re confronted with pure emotion, and the cheap sentimentality of much of what we see debases our responses
education in the arts has the potential to restore the thrill of genuine emotion
the eleventh-hour pas de deux from Swing Time, “Never Gonna Dance.” When the number comes up, they’re about to part, for reasons that don’t make any sense—she’s just learned he’s engaged to another girl and she doesn’t realize that he isn’t in love with her; her pride and her hurt feelings have gotten in the way so she can’t see what’s so obvious to us. “Does she dance very beautifully, the girl you’re in love with?” Rogers asks Astaire. “Yes, very,” he replies, clearly referring to Rogers. “The girl you’re engaged to,” she clarifies. “I don’t care,” he says. “I’ve danced with you. I’m never gonna dance again.” And after he serenades her (this lovely song is by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields), they move into a sort of “anti-dance” that articulates what the dance critic Arlene Croce calls “the hunger of blocked desire”—two spirits drawn magnetically into an expression of both their need for each other and their inability to act on that need, as if they’ve become a pair of marionettes driven on a magnificent current of emotion, with their hearts working the strings, in a dance that is the embodiment of romantic anguish.

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Sicily, Through the Eyes of the Leopard

Tags: sicily, travel, dilampedusa, fiction, literature, italy on 2008-07-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged fiction → View Popular

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel'

if:book: Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism

OnFiction: Research Bulletin: Entertainment as Play

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Malcolm Gladwell

Writers urged by ex-poet laureate to defend wildlife

The Grunge American Novel

Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? - Features, Books - The Independent

James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent

Digital Technology and English Pedagogy

thedigitalist.net » Short Fiction in the Age of the Ebook

We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

Letters - It’s Why We Read, Online and Off

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?

James Wood's How Fiction Works. - By Judith Shulevitz - Slate Magazine

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's ‘The Leopard’ Turns 50

Make AI and virtual world technologies accessible to artists so that they can create the future of immersive story entertainment | TapBot

'Atmospheric Disturbances,' by Rivka Galchen - Review

The American Scholar - The Art of Surprise - By Steve Vineberg

Sicily, Through the Eyes of the Leopard

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