Archive for March, 2010
Progressive Digressions in Tristram Shandy
In my copy of Tristram Shandy, pages 23 to 68 came loose and I joked about mixing them up and reading them in a random order, but it doesn’t work. There is order to the disorder, organization to the chaos.
Multiple Simultaneous Drafts: Google.docs and Writing
When I started the master’s program last year at San Francisco State, a friend introduced me — against my will — to Google docs. (Now listen, he insisted, this will make it much easier to write and print out your work.) I now use Google docs for almost all of my writing, including creative writing.
The Draft is Obsolete: The Word Processor and the Writing Process
The concept of the draft is obsolete, in both academic and creative writing, if drafting is seen as a process of rewriting a work anew, recreating and reforming what has already been written in a wholly new text. A “draft” these days is one point at which writing is saved or printed out. Writing now consists of changing a single, fluid text that grows, contracts and changes (as is happening to this post even now, if you could only see it happening as I do). Writing classes that teach first draft, second draft and final draft and do not show students how to use the word processor to revise a text are outdated.
Books That Read Your Gaze
Metafiction often blurs the distinction between the page and the reader. With this new machine, you must ask yourself if the book is reading the person and how that might change both reading and our ways of thinking.
“Eye Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0” (Epicenter. Wired.com).
Futurestates: A Metafilm
This short film is very meta as it plays with and blurs the distinctions between the fictional and the “real” world. There is no real distinction, you know. We filter all of our experiences of “reality” through a web of fictions and fictions are inarguably part of reality. Stories and films exist. Virtual reality is reality. Enjoy!
The Cereal Narrative
A cereal narrative: Just as the milk fills the bowl, the doorbell rings. The milk slowly warms up and the Honey Bunches of Oats turns soggy. Swelling and disintegrating, the cereal becomes a kind of brownish mush that yellows over and sours, attracting flies. Late one night, the kitchen window opens slowly, scattering the flies. (To be continued.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Technobabble: The Digital Life of Ronosaurus (Writing and Teaching with New Technologies)
Not sure how to begin the story of how I came to be sitting here with my laptop at Cafe Abir (just a moment, let me pick up my triple latte), writing a technoliteracy autobiography, but I will just get started and see what comes out. I can always fix things — make that, revise — later. After all, this changing piece of writing, which is morphing under my fingertips even now, is the climax of the story I wish to tell, the story of how my own composition process has changed because of digital technology and how that should affect the way I teach writing.
More Meta Madnesses
Some other meta-topics of interest to this metablog, subject related to language, thought, speech and writing. Delicious!
Metahuman (superhumans in DC Universe): A superhuman in DC comics, equivalent of the mutant in the Marvel Universe.
- Wikipedia: Metahumans.
- Methuman Press at metahumanpress.com
- The history of the universe, with metahumans at The Unofficial History of the DC Universe.
Why Read Spenser When Allegory Invites Despayre
When Allegory invited me to a read and feed, I hesitated. He is a thin man, easy to overlook, his yellowish skin almost transparent. He wears a mishmash of musty, old-fashioned clothing: a toga and a biblical robe, medieval hose and cod piece, moccasins and a romantic scarf. Nothing modern, except maybe the combination.
Other Meta Topics on Language, Thought, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Other meta-topics of interest, relating to language, thought, speech and writing. Enjoy!
Meta–: For the purposes of this blog, “the modern, inferred meaning of a higher-order, self-referential consideration of the nature of an activity—rather than actual, first-level participation in the activity” (Wikipedia article on Meta-discussion).
