As goes blogging, so goes literature … or, … Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

Mary Roach on Bill Streever’s Cold in last Sunday’s lead review in The New York Times:

Streever himself is a scientist, both by degree and paycheck, but writing for journals hasn’t muddied his style. Phalaropes, he writes, “swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet.” […] He sculptures lucid [...]

Is blogging ultimately the friend of war or peace?

My most disappointing conclusion from running this eight month-old experiment in blogging? It’s that we human beings appear to find fighting more enjoyable than sparkling debate and friendly disagreement.
Never mind that in answering a question about what he or she would do as a live, fully clothed substitute for a statue in the One & [...]

Blogger-hatred – Indie journalists über alles – A beauty in love with blood-and-gore

This collection of clips supports positions taken and points made in these recent entries on this blog: The rafts of the unwelcoming print journos; Stick to your Polish Joseph Conrad! –Whoa Cleopatra! ; and Ruth Padel and the presentation of intelligent pulchritude in everyday life .
LOATHING BLOGGERS
Referring to January’s baffling announcement by a respected Old [...]

Stick to your Polish, Joseph Conrad! … Whoa, Cleopatra!

A few questions and some leftover thoughts from the last entry in this blog, Ruth Padel and the Presentation of Intelligent Pulchritude in Everyday Life … in ascending order of frivolity:

Why is Derek Walcott the focus of such vicious animosity in sections of the transatlantic literary community – more than the combinination of jealousy about [...]

Ruth Padel and the presentation of intelligent pulchritude in everyday life

Something missing in the hullabaloo about a great poet, Derek Walcott, apparently having trouble leashing his libido on university campuses, is that Ruth Padel — the good poet who won* the coveted post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford last Saturday — has had one of the most strikingly sexy personae in literature. I only [...]

Pixemones: friendship, love and gender in the blogosphere

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Mending Wall. Robert Frost.

Pheromones are faff-and-nonsense. That’s sex – rather than aggregation or alarm – pheromones that I’ve weighed and found wanting. The reason why it’s virtually impossible to think [...]

Interactive – and shallow? — fiction spells contentious Vookworm

Let’s say that you’re a novelist a bit bored with yourself and by the usual plots, who feels like trying to put two characters into a gravity-smashing relationship with each other.
Why not, say, a woman who allows herself to be seduced by a much younger man? Would she necessarily have to look like Demi [...]

Flashing The Guardian — a books bloggers’ rebellion

[ This piece was originally published on Philip Hall’s/@ISA’s Xuitlacoche blog on the 3rd of February as an experiment in flash blogging. I’d recommend going there for the scintillating comment thread that followed. ]

Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation
When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – [...]

A bit more on heroes: Barack Obama’s odyssey, part 2

Hmm . . . the road to Babel is paved with misread blog posts.
Last week’s thread-starter — reflecting on Dreams From My Father — called Barack Obama a hero for triumphing over a childhood and adolescence grim enough to have justified a career as a dropout and serial detoxifier (the past). That might be hard [...]

Will Barack Obama bring back heroism?

‘There’s only one way off this planet and that’s through me.’
Will Smith as Agent J in Men in Black, 1997

President ‘has four years to save Earth’
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. . .
The Guardian, January 18, 2009
Last week, the director Spike Lee — more or less forgotten by many of [...]