summer reading report

Or, Big Hairy Post no. 4. The post-digestion literary hair-ball.

← See Mythical Creature of the Day: Bonnacon (2008-02-29) for more, though this remains my favourite for reasons of hairiness and facial expressions.

Language, textuality, the future of the book, and the art of commentary:

• BBC News: Rare words ‘author’s fingerprint’
• — Page-turning passion
• — Search engine collects historical resources
• — The Royal Society puts historic papers online
• — ‘Lost’ Shakespeare play Double Falsehood published
• — Author Michael Morpurgo welcomes book technology
• — Cash boost for UK computer museum
• — How good software makes us stupid
• Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
• Cat and Girl » Archive » Post-Literate
• Continuitas: The Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm for the Origins of Indo-European Languages
• Digital Literacy Project: Technology Training for the Automotive Service Industry
• Fabula: Le manuscrit unique, une singularité plurielle
• futureofthebook.com
• Halfbakery: Full length alliteration
• I Blame the Patriarchy: Close reading spinster-aunt-style
• io9: 5 ways the Google book settlement will change the future of reading
• Joerngruber’s Blog
• Kem’s Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing
• Language Hat
• Language Log: for instance, and²¹
• Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Carlin Romano: Total Ignorance of Philosophy is No Obstacle to Opining about Richard Rorty
• linguaphiles: Language-specific linguistic games
• Liquid Ridiculous
• Literature Compass blog
• Lost in Translation: medieval (signs, inscriptions, and displays in Washington DC–items tagged “medieval”)
• NYTimes.com On Language – Explaining the Origins of Ms.
• Omniglot
• Opunda–repetition
• Paleoglot
• Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase
• Public Service (UK): Net founder launches data website
• Reading 2.0 – Musings on the publishing revolution
• Joël de Rosnay – Le carrefour du Futur
• Straightdope.com: Linguistic term: Using a word with different meanings twice in a construction [Archive] – Straight Dope Message Board
• Ta-Nehisi Coates @ The Atlantic
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: Google’s book search: A disaster for scholars
• — Bad Writing and Bad Thinking
• — Google awards first grants for new digital humanities research program
• — Rereading the university classics – advice
• — Online forum takes notes on note-taking
• The Private Library: Movable Books and the Private Library
• The Virtual Linguist
• The Visual Linguist
• The Web of Language
• Twenty-Two Bridges
• University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science – Natural Language Processing Group: research project on “Metaphor and Metonymy: Addressing a Debate and a Neglected Problem”
• University of Saskatchewan, Dept. of English course: The History and Future of the Book
• Wikipedia: Fallacy
• — List of fallacies
• — Benjamin Mako Hill: List of homophonous phrases
• Word Journal
• xkcd: Curse Levels
• … and assorted items pertaining to Freudian slips, poetic relevance—on the edge of irrelevance, but appropriate—and the Frame Problem
• … and rereading–in the form of physical books–The Classics of practical criticism, reader-response theory, and semiotics. On which note, see also this nice piece from Le Monde today: Entretien avec Umberto Eco,”Je suis un philosophe qui écrit des romans”
• … and assorted speculative fictions, imaginative and irrealist writings, fabulations, call them what you will. A.k.a. the non-genre, anti-genre, or trans-genre. From what the mainstream labels children’s and young adults’ books (of, I insist, the good crazy-creative sort) to SF and fantasy (again, I’m picky though will try most things once, as with food); to medieval romance; to slipstream, post-cyberpunk, and other noughties’ call-them-what-you-wills. A.k.a. the stuff I also happen—through fortuitous coincidence or stronger correlation—to like reading, and to have liked reading for as long as I can remember. (I started reading very young; but broad-sense “reading” materials like L’Île aux enfants, Sesame Street, The Muppets, and The Smurfs were also key formative influences; plus Breughel, Bosch, Magritte, Delvaux, Folon, and the whole Belgian BD culture that was all around.)

The Hairy Turtle-Dove. I did wonder at first why this came up on a Google-image-search for "medieval hairy post"; as ever, context is all: the Alternate History Discussion Board.

The discussion in which I found the above (it’s really just an aside) is well worth a look: on maps:

Map Thread I—Map Thread II—Map Thread III—Map Thread IV