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Blinks

Wednesday, 02 April, 2008

Writerly bits

• Pushing Paper Out the Door: An article about the move towards a paper-less world where everything is scanned.
• A review of the manga Bible with the intersting observation that “The medium shapes the message. Manga often focuses on action and epic. Much of the Bible, as a result, ends up on the cutting room floor, and what remains is darker.” Methinks it reveals something quite interesting about the Bible as a piece of literature.
• The rainbow bookshelf (via Philip): Now colour is an interesting way to organise your books ...
• An Interview with Timothy Keller, author of The Reason for God which reveals how reading habits have changed—

  In New York City, these are pretty smart people, very educated people, but even by the mid-nineties I had found that the average young person found Mere Christianity—it just didn't keep their attention, because they really couldn't follow the arguments. They took too long. This long chain of syllogistic reasoning wasn't something that they were trained in doing. I don't think they're irrational, they are as rational, but they want something of a mixture of logic and personal appeal ...

  Even Lewis, in his Weight of Glory series, Lewis said that, before World War One, the average educational experience was twelve or thirteen people sitting in a room listening to a paper by one person then tearing it apart till 2 a.m. in the morning. And he says, now, the quintessential educational experience is listening to a celebrity lecturer, with a hundred or two hundred other people taking notes and then taking an exam. Even he said, between the wars, he saw a diminishment in people's ability to really think hard and long about issues. People want you to get to the point quickly. And they want you to tell them what's going on quickly. And they just don't have the attention span. You can look at television, you can look at the Internet, you can look at the so-called rise of narrative and loss of trust in logic—I think it's cumulative ... I don't want to say it's all relativism or all the Internet because people don't read long articles anymore. But I just know that it's very hard to find people who can wade through—unless you're a professional academic, you're not going to wade through these books anymore.

• Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location: For punctuation geeks. And the correction appended at the end of the article is just gold.
• Now that I've got my master's in writing ... I'm not writing!: And Cary Tennis has some good advice:

  The connection between writing ... and writing for money or writing for success has to be broken. You need a good, strong, regular writing practice. The ego has to be broken for the voice to come through. The voice is what you want. The voice that makes no sense at first is what you want. The voice that sounds a little crazy is what you want. Try it.

  Amen to that.

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