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Now self-published authors can get their books reviewed through Kirkus (for $425). This could certainly help give legitimacy to self-published works. I would worry about how they select reviewers for the book, and it would be curious to see reactions from those who have used the service.

"Long before it became obvious, DeLillo argued that terrorists and gunmen have rearranged our sense of reality. He has become better appreciated as the world has come to resemble his work, incrementally, with every new telegenic catastrophe, every bombing and mass shooting. Throughout DeLillo's work we encounter young men who plot violence to escape the plotlessness of their own lives. He has done more than any writer since Dostoevsky to explain them."

Review of "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr. Carr explores whether the internet is making us all ADD and killing our ability to think deeply and remember long-term.

In the context of middle class families, elements in the techno-subsystem (e.g., Internet access) may not necessarily facilitate child cognitive development; effective use of those elements, highly dependent upon parent behavior, may promote development. For example, Cho and Cheon (2005) surveyed families and found that parents' perceived control, obtained through shared web activities and family cohesion, reduced children's exposure to negative Internet content. Using the Internet at home to learn was reported in 65 cases, to play was reported in 57 cases, to browse in 35 cases, and to communicate in 27 cases. Fuchs and Wößmann (2005) inferred, having controlled for socioeconomic status, "a negative relationship between home computer availability and academic achievement, but a positive relationship between home computer use for Internet communication" (p. 581). DeBell and Chapman (2006) concluded that Internet use promotes cognitive development in children, "specifically in the area of visual intelligence, where certain computer activities -- particularly games -- may enhance the ability to monitor several visual stimuli at once, to read diagrams, recognize icons, and visualize spatial relationships" (p. 3). Van Deventer and White (2002) observed proficient 10- and 11-year-old video gamers and noted extremely high levels of self-monitoring, pattern recognition, and visual memory. In a comprehensive review of the literature of the time (when interactive digital games were relatively unsophisticated), Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, and Gross (2000) concluded that "children who play computer games can improve their visual intelligence" (p. 128). It should be noted, however, that playing video games has also been linked to childhood distractibility, over-arousal, hostility, and aggression (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Funk, Chan, Brouwer, & Curtiss, 2006).

"the full effect of the terror Burke stresses in the sublime hadn't taken shape for me until recently, watching over and over the first 30-second video clip of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. This is a frightful image in its murky greenness. And the scope of what this simple video loop suggests is nearly beyond the capacity to describe. It certainly follows several of Burke's qualifications of the sublime - the terror of the scope, the obscurity and privation of the bottom of the ocean, the suggestion of infinity - but it also raises even more questions in regard to what a particularly contemporary sublime might encompass. "

This post is reviewing a book, but includes a personal anecdote about finding the 'terror' aspect of the sublime in an internet video.

A while back I blogged about wanting to find sites like Goodreads for movies and music.  I have discovered that FLIXSTER IS EVIL and should be avoided at all costs.  Mubi is kind of  a cool alternative.  It has a great design, which is fun, but its main focus is NOT the social aspect of it; it basically seems that it is trying to be a Netflix-like business plan.  But you can make reviews and lists, and it doesn't spam all your friends and coworkers. 

An article from MediaPost reviewing another eBook for the iPad, in this case a hypertext version of Eliot's "The Wasteland."

Orson Scott Card talks about how audiobooks are convenient and are becoming less expensive (toward the bottom of the article). I thought it was interesting that he failed to mention any of the drawbacks we discussed in class, maybe he is better at concentrating than most of us... 

This is a blog that I found about the Public Domain. For those who are interested in a little more what the Public Domain is about this guy goes through a pretty good outline of the basics of every chapter. If there is a chapter that interests you, you can also find the book online.

So I was searching for some blogs about James Joyce and I came across this man's blog, Mel. Talk about being a prolific reader and writer. He reads short stories all the time and posts about each one. I think it is interesting that he started his blog not really think many would read it and now he has almost 500 followers.

Here's a remix you may have heard about.

Has anyone else noticed they have like a whole section of Barnes and Noble dedicated to Jane Austen remixes, particularly of the gory zombie persuasion?

I thought this was interesting. It talks all about Google Docs and using apps in a classroom setting and how that is changing teaching.

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.