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Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Anne Rice on writing about Others - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.sg/...e-on-writing-about-others.html

Writing Cultural Appropriation

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Oct 17
     
    "The bottom line is, you go where the intensity is for you as a writer; you give birth to characters for deep, complex reasons. And this should never be politicized by anyone. Your challenge is to do a fine and honest and effective job. Don't ever let anyone insist you give up without even trying. Two of the greatest novels about women that I've ever read, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were written by men. One of the finest novels about men that I've ever read, The Last of the Wine, was written by a woman. That was Mary Renault. And her novel, The Persian Boy, about a Persian eunuch is a classic. The vital literature we possess today was created by men and women of immense imagination, personal courage and personal drive. Ignore all attempts to politicize or police your imagination and your literary ambition."
  • sivernores on 26 Jan 22
     
    It's actually pretty cool, and I found out about a lot of interesting literature on a number of subjects, including geography. I discovered an cheap essay writing service https://order.studentshare.org/ , which you may peruse, study, and, of course, strive to improve as much as possible. I already know that these articles are superb, and that you will gain a lot from them, both academically and in terms of your personal development in this or that field.
  • janejlocane on 17 Aug 22
     
    To write even an ordinary essay is not enough effort. And at the university there are quite voluminous tasks. So I decided to turn for help with capstone project https://www.capstoneproject.net/ and my dissertation. I can imagine if I was given the task to write a book. It would be a nightmare. I wouldn't have done it.
Weiye Loh

Scientists find secret to writing a best-selling novel - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ting-a-best-selling-novel.html

Writing Literature Big Data Algorithm Popular Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • They found several trends that were often found in successful books, including heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives. Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and relied on words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as “wanted”, “took” or “promised”, while more successful books favoured verbs that describe thought processes such as “recognised” or “remembered”.
  • Weiye Loh on 12 Jan 14
     
    "Scientists find secret to writing a best-selling novel Computer scientists have developed an algorithm which can predict with 84 per cent accuracy whether a book will be a commercial success - and the secret is to avoid cliches and excessive use of verbs"
Audrey B

Social Networks Spread Defiance Online - 1 views

www.markmfredrickson.com/...nytimes-iran-twitter.pdf

Social-Networking

shared by Audrey B on 21 May 10 - No Cached
  • Audrey B on 21 May 10
     
    As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.
  • Chris Anderson on 21 May 10
     
    Interestingly, Pakistan is having these same issues right now: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/10130195.stm What I think is interesting is the clashing conceptions of what free speech constitutes and how these social media is forcing those who are used to a more totalitarian view to think about the overarching issue
Bri Zabriskie

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Chapter 1 - 0 views

www.online-literature.com/...1

huckleberry finn book literature online

shared by Bri Zabriskie on 11 May 11 - No Cached
  • Bri Zabriskie on 11 May 11
     
    How I'm going to read Huckleberry Finn novel (or attempt to at least)
Gideon Burton

Vernor Vinge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Vernor_Vinge

author

shared by Gideon Burton on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Gideon Burton on 04 May 11
     
    Bio of the author of the novel we are reading
  • Gideon Burton on 04 May 11
     
    I noticed he was a professor at SDSU, the setting for much of Rainbows End
Weiye Loh

The Mechanic Muse - What Is Distant Reading? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-what-is-distant-reading.html

Reading

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11
     
    We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can't uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let's say you pick up a copy of "Jude the Obscure," become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England - to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won't have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what's called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Belle de Jour's history of anonymity - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-20796615

Anonymity Internet Literature Writing

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • In the internet age, we have become increasingly concerned about the effects of anonymous online commentary. Anonymous bloggers can have enormous global audiences. "Trolls" can bring criticism straight to the computer screens of the people they disagree with. These trends are solidly in the tradition of literary anonymity - from unsigned political tracts to biting satirical graffiti, we've seen it all before.
  • the effects of anonymity are more important for the anonymous writer than they are for the audience. We'd still be dotty over Jane Austen's books if, like her contemporary audience, we never knew her name. The writing has enough authority and detail to carry us along in her inner world. Knowing her name, where she lived, and seeing the piecrust table where she painstakingly wrote out her manuscripts is interesting, but it's trivia. It's not what makes her novels sing.
  • Anonymous is one of our greatest writers. "From the medieval period to the modern period there have been authors who have enjoyed playing with and experimenting with anonymity, and it never really goes out of fashion," says Marcy North, author of The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Jan 13
     
    "Anon was, as Virginia Woolf noted in one of her final unpublished essays, "the voice that broke the silence of the forest". Elsewhere she suggested that "Anonymous was a woman". For anonymity has definitely been widely used by women throughout the ages, whether they're writing about relationships, sex or anything else. Without Anonymous, there are so many classics we would not have had - Gawain and the Green Knight, virtually all of the Bible and other religious texts. Anon is allowed a greater creative freedom than a named writer is, greater political influence than a common man can ever attain, and far more longevity than we would guess. Obviously, I'm a great fan of Anon's work, but then, as a formerly anonymous author, I would say that, wouldn't I?"
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Why are textbooks so expensive? - 0 views

www.skepticblog.org/...why-are-textbooks-so-expensive

Books Education Recycling ebooks

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In some cases, the costs are driven up because the market has gotten highly competitive with more and expensive features, like pricey full color throughout, and lots of ancillaries (website for the book, CD-ROM of Powerpoints or images, study guide for students, instructor’s guide, test banks, and many other extras). In the high-volume markets, like the introductory courses taken by hundreds of non-majors, these silly extras seem to make a big difference in enticing faculty to change their preferences and adopt a different book, so publishers must pull out all the stops on these expensive frills or lose in a highly competitive market. And, like any other market, the cost per unit is a function of how many you sell. In the huge introductory markets, there are tens of thousands of copies sold, and they can afford to keep their prices competitive but still must add every possible bell and whistle to lure instructors to adopt them. But in the upper-level undergraduate or the graduate courses, where there may only be a few hundred or a few thousand copies sold each year, they cannot afford expensive color, and each copy must be priced to match the anticipated sales. Low volume = higher individual cost per unit. It’s simple economics.
  • the real culprit is something most students don’t suspect: used book recyclers, and students’ own preferences for used books that are cheaper and already marked with someone else’s highlighter marker!
  • As an author, I’ve seen how the sales histories of textbooks work. Typically they have a big spike of sales for the first 1-2 years after they are introduced, and that’s when most the new copies are sold and most of the publisher’s money is made. But by year 3  (and sometimes sooner), the sales plunge and within another year or two, the sales are miniscule. The publishers have only a few options in a situation like this. One option: they can price the book so that the first two years’ worth of sales will pay their costs back before the used copies wipe out their market, which is the major reason new copies cost so much. Another option (especially with high-volume introductory textbooks) is to revise it within 2-3 years after the previous edition, so the new edition will drive all the used copies off the shelves for another two years or so. This is also a common strategy. For my most popular books, the publisher expected me to be working on a new edition almost as soon as the previous edition came out, and 2-3 years later, the new edition (with a distinctive new cover, and sometimes with significant new content as well) starts the sales curve cycle all over again. One of my books is in its eighth edition, but there are introductory textbooks that are in the 15th or 20th edition.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For over 20 years now, I’ve heard all sorts of prophets saying that paper textbooks are dead, and predicting that all textbooks would be electronic within a few years. Year after year, I  hear this prediction—and paper textbooks continue to sell just fine, thank you.  Certainly, electronic editions of mass market best-sellers, novels and mysteries (usually cheaply produced with few illustrations) seem to do fine as Kindle editions or eBooks, and that market is well established. But electronic textbooks have never taken off, at least in science textbooks, despite numerous attempts to make them work. Watching students study, I have a few thoughts as to why this is: Students seem to feel that they haven’t “studied” unless they’ve covered their textbook with yellow highlighter markings. Although there are electronic equivalents of the highlighter marker pen, most of today’s students seem to prefer physically marking on a real paper book. Textbooks (especially science books) are heavy with color photographs and other images that don’t often look good on a tiny screen, don’t print out on ordinary paper well, but raise the price of the book. Even an eBook is going to be a lot more expensive with lots of images compared to a mass-market book with no art whatsoever. I’ve watched my students study, and they like the flexibility of being able to use their book just about anywhere—in bright light outdoors away from a power supply especially. Although eBooks are getting better, most still have screens that are hard to read in bright light, and eventually their battery will run out, whether you’re near a power supply or not. Finally, if  you drop your eBook or get it wet, you have a disaster. A textbook won’t even be dented by hard usage, and unless it’s totally soaked and cannot be dried, it does a lot better when wet than any electronic book.
  • A recent study found that digital textbooks were no panacea after all. Only one-third of the students said they were comfortable reading e-textbooks, and three-fourths preferred a paper textbook to an e-textbook if the costs were equal. And the costs have hidden jokers in the deck: e-textbooks may seem cheaper, but they tend to have built-in expiration dates and cannot be resold, so they may be priced below paper textbooks but end up costing about the same. E-textbooks are not that much cheaper for publishers, either, since the writing, editing, art manuscript, promotion, etc., all cost the publisher the same whether the final book is in paper or electronic. The only cost difference is printing and binding and shipping and storage vs. creating the electronic version.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12
     
    But in the 1980s and 1990s, the market changed drastically with the expansion of used book recyclers. They set up shop at the bookstore door near the end of the semester and bought students' new copies for pennies on the dollar. They would show up in my office uninvited and ask if I want to sell any of the free adopter's copies that I get from publishers trying to entice me. If you walk through any campus bookstore, nearly all the new copies have been replaced by used copies, usually very tattered and with broken spines. The students naturally gravitate to the cheaper used books (and some prefer them because they like it if a previous owner has highlighted the important stuff). In many bookstores, there are no new copies at all, or just a few that go unsold. What these bargain hunters don't realize is that every used copy purchased means a new copy unsold. Used copies pay nothing to the publisher (or the author, either), so to recoup their costs, publishers must price their new copies to offset the loss of sales by used copies. And so the vicious circle begins-publisher raises the price on the book again, more students buy used copies, so a new copy keeps climbing in price.
Allison Frost

A Global Tour of Online Protests | UsefulArts.us - 0 views

usefularts.us/...global-tour-of-online-protests

shared by Allison Frost on 24 May 10 - Cached
  • Where have all the protests gone? Many of the most interesting and successful are making creative use of new online environments
  • Rappresentanza Sindacale Unitaria IBM Vimercate (RSU), the official trade union representing IBM’s 9,000 workers in Italy, undertook a novel form of industrial action – a strike on Second Life. IBM has a large Second Life presence, in which 2,000 characters in protest shirts, carrying signs, picketed. The result was a change in a salary increase policy for employees in Italy and an award from the French Senate.
  • Allison Frost on 24 May 10
     
    Online protests. Second life protestors with second life picket signs.
Andrea Ostler

Study Help for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - 0 views

www.diigo.com/...m%2Ff%2FIntroduction%2BPPT.pdf

shared by Andrea Ostler on 09 May 11 - No Cached
  • Andrea Ostler on 09 May 11
     
    I found this powerpoint on google scholar, and it has given me a better sense of direction in how I should read the novel.
Weiye Loh

Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ila-shamsie-author-translation

Translation Reading Language Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation.
  • "translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.
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