The Dictionary of the Khazars "For all its delights, for all the structural novelty and the comic inventiveness of the imagery, it must be said there is something rather light and airy about this
book. It is fun to chase down
all the linkages between entries; but as they are conjoined more by the bubbling repetition of motifs and the requirements of the formal devices than by real narrative event or development, it is, as
Mr. Pavic himself suggests, a bit like working a crossword puzzle."
posted by dhruva
on Nov 20, 2005 -
9 comments
The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago,
William Faulkner finished
his fourth novel. It was
published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an
appendix was
added in 1946, when
most of Faulkner's books were
out of print. Of course, a few years after that he was awarded the
Nobel Prize). It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he said, because he considered it his "most splendid failure".
Many critics think it's the finest work of an American Master: the key to Faulkner, wrote
Alfred Kazin (.pdf file), lies not only in the unflinching extremity of his God-blasted characters, but in the odd and unaccountable moments of redemptive human tenderness.
The Internet is very kind to Faulkner's fans: we can check out the
Faulkner home, his
manuscripts and even his pipe, trivia from his
Postmaster's days, we can read examples of his
snarkiness (hurled against Hemingway and
Clark Gable), we can admire the pages of
screenplays from his
Hollywood days. We can go to Faulkner academic conferences, too: in the
USA and
Japan. Want to know what
Bunny Wilson and
Ralph Ellison had to say about Faulkner?
Here.
(more inside, with Conan O'Brien)
posted by matteo
on Jun 11, 2004 -
30 comments
The web isn't proper hypertext says Ted Nelson, who probably invented the idea.
"I define hypertext as non-sequential writing ... the World Wide Web is not what we were trying to create. The links only go one way. There's no permanent publishing. There is no way you can write a marginal note that other people can see on what's in front of you. There is no way that you can quote freely. "
So is everyone fully comfortable with the idea of a "two way web", or are we still too hung up on picket fence territorialism? And how would it work, anyway?
posted by walrus
on Oct 9, 2001 -
18 comments
Modern computing born... film at 11. "On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface."
posted by pascal
on Jul 11, 2001 -
5 comments
