A new Hemingway App promises to trim the fat from your writing in a way that the Great Bearded One would’ve approved. The app uses various color codes to highlight writing written in the passive voice, writing that’s too hard to read, and also unnecessary adverbs or complex phrases. Sounds interesting enough, no? Well, the problem is that someone ran the Hemingway App on some actual Ernest Hemingway writing, and it turns out that Papa himself didn’t even write to the app’s standard.
For Sale: Hemingway App, Doesn’t Work.
Digital Love
Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 Kenyon commencement speech, published this weekend in the New York Times, covers love, consumerism, and narcissism in the digital age. If you’re concerned with critical reception, looks like you’re not a creator of “serious art and literature,” in Franzen’s eyes.
●
●
Appearing Elsewhere
My review of Tom Bissell‘s Magic Hours appears in this Sunday’s NYTBR.
2 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Appearing Elsewhere
Bet you didn’t know this Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the first “going postal” shootings in Oklahoma. I have a piece at The Morning News examining America’s export of this peculiar brand of spree killings around the world, most recently to Oslo, Norway.
Do They Accept Curiosities?
Experimental literary magazine theNewerYork wants to “screw with your head.” They also want you to submit “short but challenging pieces” for publication.
●
●
The Forgotten Delivery Man
“So much has been written about New York City as a city of histories—rich and public, deep and private. Commerce and bodies ebb and flow. For every New Yorker, there is a ghost city under the tangible one; this second, invisible layer contains the tangled web of memory and geography. I certainly have my fair share of associative ghosts; we all do. But New York City is also a city of forgetting, for better and for worse, and often against our best wishes.” Anna Wiener on the coping strategies of New Yorkers.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Baker; Sauma; Shawn; Moore; Moore
Out this week: Our Little Racket by Anjelica Baker; Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma; Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn; The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues by Edward Kelsey Moore; and New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Hemingway broke most literary traditions and became as it were the new world erudition replacing the lyrical and classical style of Proust, Waugh etc. His masculine facade reflected perhaps the pioneer spirit of America the culmination of which was the rescue of old Europe from fascism – any writer artist etc, will tell you to study the masters by all means but only in order to find your unique and personal voice.
Has anyone tried this with an Obama speech or SOTU address?