Weekly Reader

  • Two more from the winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous and three of Cesar Aira’s novels.
  • Two from the May issue of Postmodern Culture: Jeffrey T. Nealon’s The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation and Kyle A. Wiggins’ Futures of Negation: Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future and Utopian Science Fiction. No links, I am not linking to closed access journals anymore.
  • Via Grand Text Auto, a New Yorker article about the disgusting “Myspace Hoax” suicide.  As I note in the comment section, as a teenager I was the victim of fake love notes for months one year.  This was before I was online; I cannot even begin to imagine what being a teenager who is fucked with like this in the Internet age.
  • I am also reading Julian Dibbell’s A Rape In Cyberspace, which GTA also linked to.

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    Spring Conference At Monmouth

    Last week Toni Magyar and I got together one afternoon to upload the spring version of the Monmouth English Symposium blog.  Right now, we are tentatively looking at having our spring conference sometime in middle to late April.  More on that once details have been solidified.  News about presenters and our keynote speaker is sure to follow soon as well.

    Toni and I will be spending some time later this week beginning to draft what we will be presenting at the conference.  More on that soon.

    Hex

    Hex.JPG

    This week I have been watching the BBC series Hex.  After hearing that Hex was supposed to be the BBC's answer to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but also hearing elsewhere it was "like Charmed, but worse" I figured I would check it out. 

    While not quite as bad as Charmed, Hex is very, let's say, derivative of a few shows.  My biggest problem with this show is how overly dramatic it is.  The melodrama is very high and the "humor" is not funny.  Also, the protagonist is an idiot.  She makes painfully obvious mistakes that even Buffy Summers on her worse day, and there were plenty of those one could argue, would never even conceive of making. 

    I will finish it up later tonight, but I am not that impressed. 

    Pleasure Of The Text (Part Two)

    Another great quote from Barthes’ The Pleasure Of The Text.  This is the best summary of the writerly text, and romance, I have ever read:

    To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work.  Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.  I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.  (24)

    Thesis...Linking

    No thesis reading this week: I am working on my final papers for the semester today and throughout the weekend.  I will offer a set of links I created for my symposium presentation last Friday.  I created a list of links to all of the different electronic literature works I mentioned.

    I will have more from my presentation online soon.