MachineMachine /stream - tagged with literature http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Worth a new Mass? http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2011/12/worth-a-new-mass.html/the-tls-blog-worth-a-new-mass Worth a new Mass? "How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?" http://t.co/K8ek35Lh ]]> Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:06:14 -0700 http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2011/12/worth-a-new-mass.html/the-tls-blog-worth-a-new-mass Tom McCarthy: My desktop http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka's obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw… ]]> Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:34:28 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false The Millions : "I would prefer not to" (Bartleby’s Occupation of Wall Street) http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/bartleby%E2%80%99s-occupation-of-wall-street.html I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it had never happened in America before. Wasn’t the whole point of passive resistance to just be there? To not make any demands? As I tried to come up with a good parallel, I found myself thinking of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s short story about an office worker, Bartleby, who decides out of nowhere that he doesn’t feel like working anymore, but continues to show up at the office every… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:38:56 -0700 http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/bartleby%E2%80%99s-occupation-of-wall-street.html Zombie Editions: An Archaeology of POD Areopagiticas http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2010/12/zombie-editions-archaeology-of-pod.html This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable scholarly print editions published by university presses, indistinguishable at first glance except for a few glaring markers. Like a mismatched cover image -- -- or excessively expressive titles: Closer examination reveals their undead status. In the case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica, the publisher is the aptly-named BiblioLife, a project of BiblioLabs, which designs software "to address the challenges of cost-effectively bringing old books back to life." (BiblioLabs takes… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:06:15 -0700 http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2010/12/zombie-editions-archaeology-of-pod.html Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author? Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 07:04:52 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html Crusoe film adaptations and *that* footprint http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/197212 Robinson Crusoe film adaptations. Which are the best ones? Also, *that* footprint... For a project I am working on, I want to isolate the moment in Robinson Crusoe where he discovers the savage footprint, imprinted in the sand, for the first time.

In the book this footprint is discovered quite a few years before Friday arrives. It signifies the first time Crusoe realises that there are 'others' visiting his Kingdom.

It has been critically engaged with by the likes of Umberto Eco, Susan Stewart (two times) and Simon O'Sullivan. Do you… ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:31:01 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/197212 Reading Life - What We Do to Books http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves. As a kid I borrowed books from libraries. When I was a student I often bought used books, some with other people’s annotations in pencil. These could be erased, but I occasionally settled for a book with the previous owner’s name and notes… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:09 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html Reading Life - What We Do to Books http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books). I don’t mean on the reputations or royalties of the authors who wrote the books but on the actual physical objects themselves.

As a kid I borrowed books from libraries. When I was a student I often bought used books, some with other people’s annotations in pencil. These could be erased, but I occasionally settled for a book with the previous owner’s… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:32:05 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/reading-life-what-we-do-to-books.html Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or the next big thing? http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ The Monster Ate Vegetables http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-monster-ate-vegetables.php/toread-the-monster-ate-vegetables-by-stefany-anne-golberg-roundtable

It’s surprising that Mary Shelley would make her horrible Monster a vegetarian. Surprising, because we think we know our monsters well. We’ve looked at Frankenstein’s monster a million times. But we never really listened to what he had to say. It shouldn't be surprising that Frankenstein’s monster is a vegetarian, because we've always known that vegetarians are monsters. Mary Shelley understood this. “Devil,” “fiend,” “insect,” Frankenstein calls his creation, but for Shelley he was Adam—purity before the Fall, goodness, gentleness, freedom, and also loneliness, failure, devastation. For all these reasons, Shelley made her Monster a vegetarian.

]]> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:26:54 -0700 http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-monster-ate-vegetables.php Ubik: Philip K. Dick http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7527941832

Ubik

book-aesthete:

Philip K. Dick. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969 

First edition, first printing of this scarce title.

]]> Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:39:11 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7527941832 Friday, by Michel Tournier http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tournier.htm French writer, who gained fame at the age of forty-three with his first novel, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967, Friday; or, The Other Island), an ingenious reworking of the classic Robinson Crusoe theme. Michel Tournier's parodic and sometimes disturbing works can be read as comments upon the contemporary world, but are often based on old myths and stories.

Robinson was too exhausted to measure the full extent of his misfortune. "Since it isn't Más a Tierra" he reflected simply, "then it is the Island of Desolation," summing up his own situation with this impropmptu babtism.… ]]> Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:36:10 -0700 http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tournier.htm How to survive the age of distraction http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter… ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:21:36 -0700 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html The Things, by Peter Watts http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:13:19 -0700 http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem, himself a fluent English speaker, was always scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of two film versions of the… ]]> Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:29:33 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 First ever direct English translation of Solaris published http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Telling of humanity's encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox's 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.
… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:07:40 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris Post-Artifact Books and Publishing http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/ We will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers… ]]> Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:50:47 -0700 http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/ Georges Bataille Electronic Library http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/ Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of a wide-ranging body of work that includes philosophy, economics, poetry, and pornography. In all of these writings, Bataille was concerned to articulate a "science of the heterogeneous," a philosophy of everything repudiated by civil society: shit, blood, sacrifice, deviance, violence. The wellsprings of this philosophy apparently lay in personal experience — in particular his childhood with a suicidal mother and a blind, syphilitic father — and yet his ideas resonated… ]]> Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:18:13 -0700 http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/ We by Evgeny Zamyatin: Images from Other Worlds http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5540919346

We by Evgeny Zamyatin

Images from Other Worlds: A new exhibition at the British Library presents the rich history of SF down the ages, from Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century to the Russian novel that inspired 1984.

]]> Mon, 16 May 2011 03:02:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5540919346 Georges Bataille : Literature And Evil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 03:29:37 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA&feature=youtube_gdata