Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
2012 Hugo Nominees — For Free!
John Scalzi rounded up online versions of all of the stories nominated for this year’s Hugo Award. Read up!
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On Remembering and Forgetting
“We have all heard the claim, ‘the victors write the textbooks.’ Among the many ways to unpack the phrase is this: that once upon a time history was bound to and relied on communally agreed upon facts. That is to say, there was not a culture of record the way there is now. There were not cameras and photographs capturing all human movement or digital archives where information was stored in ‘clouds.’ While our methods for remembering have evolved, the ethical question at the heart of recollection remains: how do we tell about the past and who gets to tell it?” Lindsey Drager writes for the Michigan Quarterly Review about memory and storytelling.
****!
Oh, shit: looks like many of our curse words are quickly going extinct. (There is good news, however, contained in this delightful sentence: “Still, according to Sheidlower, f-bomb enthusiasts need not fret too much.”)
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OH, THE WORDS
2012 is off to a good start for DIAGRAM. In February, their fourth print anthology will be released. Their next issue will be an “ALL-ESSAY SPECTACULAR” (caps their own), and they’ve just released their latest issue on their site.
The Applicant
“‘Poetry, I feel,” said Sylvia Plath in a radio interview in 1962, the year before her suicide, ‘is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.'” Fifty years after her death, an argument for close reading.