Four women will invent time travel. Three will make their mark on history. Two will do anything to be remembered. One will not survive. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL Summer is here and we are cracking open a new book together. We’d love for you to join us in reading The Psychology of Time Travel …
Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel Read More »
“The wave is one. There’s a reason we’re drawn to it, whether viewing or watching entranced as one wave after another breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy charging static matter until that energy is spent and equilibrium returns, elegant and satisfying. Arcs or waves exist all around as waves of …
Narrative Architecture in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode Read More »
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.” Anthony Trollope For most teachers and professors wondering how to read more books, establishing new routines, resolutions, and goal-setting are the answer. But let’s face it: life is changing at a far more rapid …
“The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes …
How Time and Space Converge to Evoke Walter Benjamin’s Aura Read More »
“Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.” – Marshall McLuhan When we trace language from orality, characterized by the pre-socratics and the passing of tradition from one …
Walter Ong’s Psychodynamics of Orality and the Reader Read More »
“The book industry is focusing more on diverse voices and stories: a reflection of the real demographic of the United States, allowing all to find their stories reflected in books. Children’s publishers across the industry have put an emphasis on finding diverse authors and stories, and I believe adult publishers are accelerating their efforts as well. All voices should be represented …
“Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of curiosity.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves ALBERTO MANGUEL (BORN 1948) Alberto Manguel is a proliferate writer and reader. His world travels both in and out of books converge in everything he writes. His writings explore an intimate love of reading that is arguably unparalleled by anyone alive. …
A Thousand Eyes of Curiosity With Alberto Manguel Read More »
“In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.” Henri Bergson Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Henri Bergson was a …
Henri Bergson on the Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought Read More »
“The art of rhetoric underlines the ambiguity of language; to practice the art, one remains mindful that all conclusions are provisional, tentative. The art lies not in the completion of a text, but in the transfiguration of one text — one system of possibilities — into another.” William A. Covino, The Art of Wondering REVISING …
William Covino on the Art of Wonder in Philosophy Read More »
“Hail to Thee, Logos, Thou Vast Almighty Title, In Whose name we conjure— Our acts the partial representatives Of Thy whole act.” Kenneth Burke MISUNDERSTANDING TRUTH There is a huge misunderstanding in culture that the idea of relativism has wiped out the notion of absolute reality. Consequently, morals decline and society is in shambles. This …
“One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” David Foster Wallace Who’s there? The famous words Shakespeare pens at the beginning of Hamlet are answered 387 short years later in the first two words of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: I …
David Foster Wallace and the Utter Hell of Solipsism Read More »
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. Charles Scribner, Jr. When we trace language from orality, characterized by the pre-socratics and the passing of tradition from one mouth to the next, to literacy made possible by writing …
The Muse Learns to Read: Trace the Process of Intellectual Becoming Read More »
“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation WHAT IS HYPERREALITY? Hyperreality is …
Tracing the Evolution of Jean Baudrillard’s Hyperreality Read More »
“Camerado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms…” Walt Whitman, So Long! In William Covino’s book, The Art of Wondering (1988), he advances Plato’s definition of rhetoric that he develops …
On the Energy of Language and the Rhetorics of Reading Read More »
“My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.” Mark Z. Danielewski In an interview with Google, Mark Z. Danielewski comments on the didactic way he writes his novels. This might come as a surprise if you …