I am hesitating to finish the piece because I'm not particularly keen to add to the navel-gazing wordage that abounds in our wee world, but I do feel I'd like to add something to the debate. Outside the Academy, Outside the Media, as a title, gives the flavour of what I'd like to say: blogs allow for (actually are) an independent space where conversations, often only seen in/around universities, can take place in an considered way, at our own pace, about what literature is, about what we want from it, about what we as (critical) readers can bring to it. They do this (create and participate in this conversation) outside of institutional constraints. My concern is that new constraints arrive if blogs see themselves as a replacement for the print media. The print media is often little more than a sales catalogue: critical engagement is downplayed; new books and new writers are overly praised for work that, on reading, is banal and underwhelming. The blogosphere is already a hugely varied place, and a daily changing landscape, but I fear that this desire I percieve for recognition by the real/old/print media could dilute what is different and powerful and energising about blogs in the first place.

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Wired News: Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

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Wired News: Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

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Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review

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The New York Times > Magazine > Dr. Ecstasy

For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. (Timothy Leary called him one of the century's most important scientists.) By Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ''empathogens,'' convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one's sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion -- in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy.

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Fast Company Now

"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail." -- Charlie Parker (1920-1955)

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James Wolcott

http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/the_litblog_coo.html

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THE LITBLOG CO-OP

http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/the_litblog_coo.html

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Sunday, May 15, 2005

Opening Salvo

What exactly is a salvo?

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