The Awl is upset with Dave Eggers‘ novelization of Where The Wild Things Are, a chapter from which was published in The New Yorker along with the publicity photo that is driving them bonkers. As is the terrible writing.

Hands Off That Rumpus, Dave Eggers!

Tom Scocca: And the next nine pages, not counting the cartoons, are devoted to a piece of “short fiction” by one of the Warner Bros. movie’s screenwriters, which is a novelization of the Warner Bros. movie’s story.

This is a big, long step beyond using the fiction space to give everyone a preview of the new Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a step that carries the New Yorker off the sidewalk and into a deep ditch bubbling with raw sewage.

I am upset because it was the single most stupid piece of writing I can remember ever seeing there, bar none. Read the rest of this entry »

“How will computation transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy?”

“Our fundamental concern is with the ways in which we encounter space not simply as a container for our actions, but as a setting within which we act. The embodied nature of activity is an issue for a range of technologies.”

Isn’t that lovely. The embodied nature of activity.

“This social character means that spaces are not ‘given;’ they are the products of active processes of interpretation. The meaningfulness of space is a consequence of our encounters with it.

Yeah, okay, so. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, I wish I had slowed down a bit before posting the book idea, but then, you know that you’re getting me. Raw. Flawed. Impulsive.

This has been sitting in my Drafts folder since at least March. Oh, it’s well worth writing about. This type of thinking, this type of guy.

I bash ahead. There are pros and cons to this approach. Pros? You get stuff done. Cons? You mess up in public and things are half baked. You look stupid. Uninformed. Unprepared.

It’s simply that . . . well, keep reading . . .

See, in the old world you only got to read the book, you never got to see the mess.

I am quite sure the culture is dead, and I am living in a dream . . .

Life is messy, and my blogging is too. The more I write out in public, the more I realize a good blog lets you see the mess. Lets you see behind the scenes. Gets you involved in building things.

Damn, time’s up—and it’s just as I feared.

Ever had the wind knocked out of you?

If you wanna read perfection, then this isn’t the place for you. Go read Shakespeare.

It’s exactly like that.

The charm of tragic literature is that we feel that its heroes could have escaped their fate but they do not succeed because of their weakness, their pride, or their blindness. Besides, Hugo tells us, ‘Such a vertigo, such an error, such a ruin, such a fall that astonished the whole of history, is it something without a cause? No … the disappearance of that great man was necessary for the coming of the new century. Someone, to whom none can object, took care of the event … God passed over there. Dieu a passé.’

—Umberto Eco