Been on vacation a good long while. Felt good. I’m starting my sabbatical, so I need to get my brain turning again. So here I am. I read the Salon interview with Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on it. Maybe it is the partisan […]
The next book I’m eager to read is Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Amazon). It’s been getting a lot of attention. Time magazine has a piece this week proclaiming the novel as the next big thing. I’ve taught his short story collection Drown a number of times. From the descriptions I’ve […]
I’m very happy to announce that my book, The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, is now available from Parlor Press. My thanks to Byron Hawk, David Blakesley, Marc Santos, and many others who supported my along the way. Here’s the book description from the Parlor Press website. In The Two Virtuals, Alex Reid shows […]
Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel’s characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role […]
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=4802069101805621765&hl=en The second installment in my hopefully ungoing video blog series. A discussion of my forthcoming book from Parlor Press, The Two Virtuals. The video covers the intersection of the "technological virtual" with a "philosophical virtual" theory of materiality. […]
I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. It’s a quick read and an interesting book, though you can certainly get the main point by reading his Wired article and the many discussions of it around the web. However I do have a couple comments to make about the book. First, Anderson begins the book by […]
I’ve just read Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line. It came out a few years ago (2003), but it’s new to me ;). Here’s the "bottom line" to me. Kirp does not naively express nostalgia for a time when academia had a united sense of itself and its values (as if such a time […]
I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. The text is a popularization (i.e. meant for non-technical audience) of Pinker’s work in cognitive science. It’s argument is largely founded on the theory of evolutionary psychology. It is an interesting theory, and I’m particularly interested in its accounting for the (perhaps simultaneous) development of consciousness […]
Alex Reid