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• Chapter 7: Close Encounters of the Web Kind
  The World Wide Web was a social network from its earliest days, but it wasn't much like the social networks of today. It was a small world, for one thing, and everybody in it had some degree of technical skill. Maybe that's one reason the earliest creatures to populate this society tended to be such strange specimens, and also why our friendships often had an obsessive edge ...
• Enoch Soames on Twitter, or The Devil Went Down To The British Library
  There’s a short story by Max Beerbohm, published in 1919, that sometimes comes up in philosophy classes. “Enoch Soames, a Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties” tells the story of Max Beerbohm, the author-as-character-within-the-novel, and his encounter with Enoch Soames, an unsuccessful writer and hanger-on in the London cafe scene in the 1890s. Enoch is frustrated that …
• How David Shields Wrote A Book That Killed Fiction But Saved A Little Kitten’s Life, And Then Blew It At The End
  I was so totally, completely in the tank for David Shields. All he had to do was write a book I halfway liked. David Shields is an author and teacher of creative writing who published in 2010 a collage of thoughts about modern literature called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. He declared that fiction was currently …
• D. G. Myers’ Last Month on Earth
  D. G. Myers, a celebrated literary critic, professor and blogger, died quietly of cancer in late September. For many like me who only knew D. G. Myers through his writings and online presence, his death was no surprise. We had read about it on A Commonplace Blog or in Time magazine, or in his much-praised …
• Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra
  Twenty-five centuries ago, a Hindu scholar named Panini produced an analysis of the Sanskrit language so remarkable that later language theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure would eventually cite it as the foundation of linguistics itself. Panini shows up in Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, a new book by novelist …
• Kathy Acker: Dead Doll Humility
  GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND. I saw Kathy Acker’s name fly by in a tweet yesterday. Her name carries power for those who remember it. Alternative and transgressive literature blossoms in today’s Internet-powered cultural scene, but there was a time (back when …