Weekly Reader

Daniel Green sums up my thoughts on the book the son of Susan Sontag wrote about her final days much more articulately than I would.  I don’t understand why anyone would want to read that book.

Papers from perthDAC 2007, including Jill Walker-Rettberg, Christy Dena, and Mary Flanagan all look very interesting.

Lauren Elkin on Japanese Literature and culture.

Weekly Reader

Daniel Green writes about Dewey’s Art as Experience yet again.

Fred Hammer from It’s Alive Fanzine interviews Greg Cameron, who drummed for the excellent SST band October Faction over at Double Cross.

Grand Text Auto announces a new issue of New River.  There are some really good works of electronic literature in this issue which I will comment on soon.

The rather famous, it seems, classic game Oregon Trail is being ported to the IPhone.  Hopefully a version for the Nintendo DS will come afterwards.

Weekly Reader

• Christy Dena’s insightful response to Jane McGonigal’s essay The Puppet Master Problem: Design For Real World, Mission-Based Gaming from the Second Person anthology.

• Michael Filas review of N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts.

• Daniel Green reviews the new James Wood book in the new issue of Open Letters Monthly.

Meanwhile…

• The New Yorker piece on Obama’s early years in Chicago politics is another indicator he is just as scummy and slimy as the next politician.  Making the right friends, the right votes, the right influences; you might counter by saying “that’s politics” but I say that if you take part in that crap, I blame you.  I’d rather have no government than one filled with slimeballs.  None of the above…yet again…in 2008.

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn recently passed away.  When we moved to Manahawkin, I remember the first friend I made was reading The Gulag Archipelago at the time.  We started to bond while discussing that and other books.

• Io9 offers a guide for fans of the modern Doctor Who series who wish to get into the classic series.

• Veronica Esposito comments on the amazing ending of The Mill On The Floss and links to a review of the novel from a 1860 issue of The Atlantic.

• PETA still sucks as much as I remember.

Weekly Reader

• From Fibreculture, Caroline McCaw on the art of Second Life and Axel Bruns looks at used based “produsage.”

• Due to some monetary constraints I was unable to attend ELO 08, but Scott Rettberg posted his presentation over at Grand Text Auto. More on that soon.

• Barrett Hathcock’s essay on the Internet from The Quarterly Conversation.

• Catching up on fiction from The New Yorker: Bolano, Diaz, Eugenides, and a previously untranslated story by Nabokov.

• Seamus Heaney’s 1985 review of Mr. Palomar from the New York Times.

• Daniel Green’s review of the intriguing Lost Books Of The Odyssey.

• The New Yorker had a big piece last week on Keith Olbermann.

Meanwhile, on Twitter…

• The New Republic pays tribute to de Beauvoir.

• Terra Nova covers a promising MMO called Lila Dreams.

• Greg Palast on the preemptive theft of the 2008 election. Speaking of, maybe I should just sleep in anyway.

• My new desktop background (Kind of big and exciting casting spoilers for the finale of Doctor Who)

• Kristin Hersh has a new website.

And…

• Margaret Atwood won a big literary award in Spain.

• A member of the old New York hardcore band Ultra Violence gets a mention in The New Yorker too.

Weekly Reader

• A few weeks ago The New Yorker had an interesting article about Google’s book scanning project and the snags it is hitting because of lawsuits.  Interestingly enough, right after I first typed this bullet point a BBC news article came up in my reader about Microsoft criticizing Google’s program.

• The spring issue of The Quarterly Conversation is now online.  Among the contributors this time are some of my favorite bloggers: Veronica Esposito from Conversational Reading, Derik Badman from MadInkBeard, and Dan Green from The Reading Experience.

• A Jeanette Winterson manuscript was found on a train in England.  By a fan hilariously enough.

• If you have time in July, head to Wisconsin to check out the GLS conference.

Weekly Reader

• The Reading Experience has another post about John Dewey up.

• One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million.  Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.

• Veronica over at Conversational Reading finds War & Peace to be a bit of a disappointment.  I started reading it back in high school but never finished it.  Maybe I will pick that up again this summer.

• It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week.  This week’s interview is from Nerve:

I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums.  When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.

• Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:

Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States — from an educational point of view.