Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
Tag: mind and media
How reading can save us from the digital dispersion of the self
Here are some choice passages from an insight-rich essay by historian James McWilliams at The American Scholar, in which he discusses two major and complementary options for dealing with digital technology’s epochal assault on the stable self: first, take serious and substantial steps to humanize the digital world; second, retain (or return to) a serious…
Teeming Links – July 11, 2014
Apologies for the dearth of posts during the week leading up to now. I have reached crunch time on both the mummy encyclopedia and the paranormal encyclopedia, and, in combination with the fact that just this week I started a new day job at a new (to me) college, my time will be limited in…
Teeming Links – June 13, 2014
In a truly horrific instance of mythic and memetic madness, Slender Man has now inspired two teens to try and murder a friend and (apparently) a daughter to try and murder her mother. For those who aren’t aware, Slenderman is “perhaps the Internet’s best and scariest legend,” a daemonic/demonic monster that was created in full…
The digital murder of the Gutenberg mind
Here’s a double dose of dystopian cheer to accompany a warm and sunny Monday afternoon (or at least that’s the weather here in Central Texas). First, Adam Kirsch, writing for The New Republic, in a piece dated May 2: Everyone who ever swore to cling to typewriters, record players, and letters now uses word processors,…
How “the news” creates a fake hyperworld in our heads
This absorbing video condenses the message presented by philosopher Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual, whose basic thesis and purpose is described by the publisher as follows: We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day . . . but…
Looking for a still point amid our digital cacophony? Consider writing in longhand.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I kept a longhand journal. It was where I learned the sound of my own inner voice and the rhythm of my own thoughts, and where I gained a more conscious awareness and understanding of the ideas, subjects, emotions, and themes that are, through sheer force of gravitational…
Teeming Links – September 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening and presiding word comes from Jonathan Franzen: While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus — “the Great Hater.” Nowadays, the refrain…
Dystopia now: We’re living in (and living out) a real-life “Harrison Bergeron” scenario
Rebecca Solnit, writing in London Review of Books: In or around June 1995 human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was…
Teeming Links – September 6, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To introduce today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading, here’s a description of a trend in academia that represents one of the most ironic of all ironies (as described by the excerpt), and also one of the most welcome and revealing developments of the present age: It’s odd…