in defense of genre fiction

In the British journal New Scientist, Kim Stanley Robinson makes a case for Virginia Woolf having been influenced by star Maker and Last and First Men, novels by the science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon: These strange novels made a real impact on Woolf. After reading them, her writing changed. She had always been interested in writing...

Beyond the Wild Wood

My commendation of that masterpiece The Wind in the Willows is online at the First Things site — though only temporarily, I think.

flipping fast

Google’s new Fast Flip intrigues me — I’d like to see it develop into a replacement for my RSS feed reader, and I think it might. Presumably Google’s Marissa Mayer is thinking of Fast Flip when she says this: The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example,...

a librarian rants

Here: No sooner do I bristle at the college rankings and decide to ignore them for another year, than along comes the Beloit College Mindset List, guaranteed to make me feel both antediluvian and out of touch with the new clientele. Ouch!, I thought, when I saw item #4 for the Class of 2013: “[Students born in 1991] have never used a...

at least they’re writing . . .

Some time back I posted about the idea that even if young people are reading stuff their elders and betters think are trash, “at least they’re reading.” The question was simply whether reading anything is better than reading nothing. Well, we can ask the same question about writing: As the school year begins, be ready to hear...

the Vigilant School lives!

Here’s J. C. Hallman: I was at a dinner party one night. There was a nice pork loin and a big oval table, and good wine, and cheerful table-talk through the main course. Then, somehow, the subject of “good books” came up — by which was meant a common standard of objective aesthetic merit. Another tricky subject, to be sure, but...

bookstores and supermarkets

In Richard Nash’s review of Ted Striphas’s outstanding The Late Age of Print — a book I still need to say more about here — Nash reveals this little historical nugget: In the history of shop design, it is bookstores, strangely enough, that were the precursors of supermarkets. They, alone of all types of shop, made use of shelves...

work in progress

Folks, I’m still getting used to this new system — I’m struggling to get the posts looking the way they’re supposed to, and to have consistency from post to post, and from browser to browser. (The text looks rather different in WebKit browsers than it does in Gecko ones — and what it looks like in IE I...

(calligraphy by Hassan Massoudy) From limited language: Gutenberg’s revolution, which made possible many other technological revolutions in Western Europe and North America, couldn’t have happened without two highly significant characteristics of the Roman alphabet. First, the isolated nature of its letterforms and, second, the fact...

bricking the Kindle

When I lost my Kindle I had some of the same thoughts: Samuel Borgese, for instance, is still irate about the response from Amazon when he recently lost his Kindle. After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card. Then he asked Amazon to put the serial number of his wayward device...