Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
September 1, 2017
This is just a brief follow-up to last night’s post on my personal blog about my experience reading biblical scholars. All scholarly guilds have their characteristic markers of valid participation, but they vary considerably. For biblical scholars those markers seem to be, as far as I can tell, largely structural: that is, as I...
August 28, 2017
Here’s a brief description of a course I’ll be teaching next semester: In a wonderful early poem, “Merlin Enthralled,” Richard Wilbur describes the way that magic drains from the Arthurian world when the wizard is no longer around to generate it: Fate would be fated; dreams desire to sleep. This the forsaken will...
August 26, 2017
… because there’s a new Adam Roberts novel! No one has yet said to me, “Of course you praise Adam Roberts’s novels, you’re his friend.” But if anyone ever did say that to me I’d reply that Adam and I have become friends in large part because I admire his novels — and his criticism as well. A few months back I...
June 27, 2017
We’re going to have radio silence here at Text Patterns for a while — I’m coming to the end of a year of research leave and have a number of projects, small and large, that I need to wrap up before school resumes in August. One of those projects is related to my previous post: Our social media put us in an odd situation in relation...
June 27, 2017
I have many questions — real, deep, sincere questions — about this. Does Katherine Dettwyler really believe that a person deserves torture and death for stealing a poster? Or does she, rather, believe that a person deserves torture and death for being a clueless privileged culturally-imperialist white male? Or does she, perhaps,...
June 26, 2017
Few writers have meant as much to me, as consistently, over many years as Loren Eiseley — I say a bit about my teenage discovery of him in this essay. I am now writing a piece on the new Library of America edition of his essays for Education and Culture, and, man, is it going to be hard for me to keep it below book-length. I keep...
June 26, 2017
In his blog-through of the works of H. G. Wells, Adam Roberts has reached Tono-Bungay, and there’s much food for thought in the post. Real food, not patent medicine like Tono-Bungay itself. Much of the novel, in Adam’s account, considers just that relationship: between the real and the unreal, the health-giving and the destructive,...
June 24, 2017
At Macdrifter, Gabe Weatherhead makes a vital point: But Apple has a blind spot that I think might mean the iPad never has parity with the Mac. The App Store just doesn’t encourage big powerful app development. The price point on the iOS App Store is too low for many indie developers to succeed. I look at the most powerful apps I use...
June 21, 2017
I’ve just read Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin, and it’s a magnificent achievement — one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. I especially admire Browne’s judgment in knowing when to stick with the events of the life and when to pull back her camera to reveal the larger social contexts in which...
June 20, 2017
Bruno Latour shares with Timothy Morton a determination to overthrow the concept of “nature” because he believes that that concept “makes it possible to recapitulate the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series.” Therefore any genuine (non-anthropocentric) “political ecology” — of the sort I briefly described in a...