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saving time
Jenny Odell, Saving Time I see interfaces. Interfaces are everywhere. They are simple, everyday, vital, like the doorknobs that let us use our apelike hands to manipulate the innards of a mechanical doorknobs. They are complex, obscure, ridiculous if we weren’t so dependent on them, like the computers simulating human users interacting with virtual mainframe…
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hit refresh
My review of Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh. Short review? Skip.
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Dhalgren
This review discusses racial and sexual violence. A lot. And make a reference to gross stuff with poop. “Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days—” I said. “They can’t live in Bellona,” Tak went on. “In Helmsford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car.…
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geek fascism
To my mind, there is no better place on the internet where highbrow and lowbrow mingle freely and in various novel mixtures than the Los Angeles Review of Books. Their contributors feel young and fresh compared to other “serious” book review outlets, their interests range from narrow academic topics to popular culture and any given…
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Circe ፧ Madeline Miller
The highest praise I can give to Circe is to simply describe, simply and without exaggeration, how I felt when I finished the book. It felt like a heavy weight on my chest, and like every feeling of loneliness and powerlessness and fear had been dug up from the deep places I had tried to…
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Tangerine
A delightful discovery I made while starting to write this re-review was a blog post I wrote 10 years ago about the books that made a deep impression on me. Tangerine was one of those books. I’m tempted to rattle off things that my home town had in common with Tangerine/Lake Windsor Downs—a citrus growing…
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gr(eat)
I never get tired of the highbrow/lowbrow debate. There’s a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on (according to the writer, Michael Clune) a reluctance for humanities scholars to engage in critical evaluation (as opposed to interpretation). This eschewal of hierarchy appears eminently progressive. Who am I to say that one book is…
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"a little bird told me…"
Yesterday, I just started reading in earnest the titanic, 5-volume, 3,856-page Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. One tidbit I’m particularly tickled by was this account of the origin of the idiom “a little bird told me
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"a little bird told me…"
Yesterday, I just started reading in earnest the titanic, 5-volume, 3,856-page Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. One tidbit I’m particularly tickled by was this account of the origin of the idiom “a little bird told me
