Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Ebook fan Robert Nagle left a very interesting comment on my recent posting about Amazon's Kindle. Recommended. Robert has also responded to my posting at Teleread. Reading-and-technology fans take note: as far as I know, Teleread is the only online site that regularly covers ebooks and ebook readers.

* Maxine makes some sense of LibraryThing. (Link thanks to Dave Lull.) Social networking for the cataloguing-inclined?

* Mencius Moldbug has a good time dumping on some all-too-typical contempo poetry. Great passage:

Certainly the best poetry of the 20th century was written from the '20s through the mid-'60s ... In the '60s, though, something awful happened. Poetry became a Federal jobs program. To use the terminology from my theory of corruption, it became a form of edupatronage.

The great disaster was the enormous expansion of higher education in the '60s and '70s. There is a reason so many college campuses have that abominable Brutalist architecture ..

The overwhelming force behind this expansion was a massive injection of Federal subsidies ... Education, for New Deal [and Great Society] Democrats, is just like immigration -- a way of making more Democrats. Of course, no one thinks of it this way, but the machine works whatever its parts are thinking.

(Link thanks to Derek Lowe.)

* Bryan Appleyard wonders why sci-fi doesn't get more respect. (Link thanks to ALD.)

Best,

Michael

I love LibraryThing, and I've discovered some wonderful books through it that I doubt I would ever have found otherwise.

Posted by: includedmiddle on December 6, 2007 5:54 PM

Mencius' posting genuinely made me laugh out loud at his malicious comments. They include:

"The point of Starbucks is that it allows an enormous slice of America, a slice certainly far bigger than the 20% or so who can actually claim to be Brahmins, to feel like they are part of the ruling class for 15 minutes or so.... Good ordinary people, who get to pay $3 for a pretty good coffee, and feel like they went to Harvard and work for a nonprofit. "

"This man has had more poetry teachers than some of us have had sex partners. (Hopefully this list does not overlap.)"

"Instead, one ascends in the poetry world exactly the same way that one ascended in the Soviet intelligence services: by joining the right clique and remaining loyal to it. It is a pure pyramidal patronage system."

Parental Warning: The posting is anything-but-PC.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on December 8, 2007 2:35 PM






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