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In Praise of Mnemosyne
A Portion of My Memory Theater A slightly sad but lovely meditation here, ranging from from Plato’s “Phaedrus” to Google as “The Last Library”: What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects — the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives — is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.Read More
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Tightrope and Knott
When you start thinking about money and success in publishing poetry you may as well be a tightrope walker who thinks about falling. These and other illuminations, some regarding the esteemed, irascible, and tenderhearted Bill Knott, in today’s post on Bob Arnold’s blog, A Longhouse Birdhouse.Read More
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You, Ron Silliman!
Another fine link you’ve led me to…. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe? To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers […] provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading. Read the whole article here. I haven’t decided yet what I think about this, but I have often wondered if many of us don’t fetishize the physical book.Read More