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Finally, another human on this planet that does not think that Toni Morrison is the greatest writer alive. B.R. Myers writes of Morrison’s new novel A Mercy that:

How shallow and vague that is; how glibly it breezes through the life of the mind. A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative “real time.”

For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath “aslide with wintergreen,” evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” No one likes an archaizer, apart from a million Cormac McCarthy fans, but a novelist writing of the 17th century should at least avoid language that is jarringly inconsistent or out of place. Reminiscing, the slaves vacillate between would-be-poetic English and an equally improbable sort of Hollywood Injun: “Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in.” Anachronisms abound, from New Age lingo like “She gives off a bad feeling” to the dialect of the postbellum South: “her borning young.” We are even told that our Anglo-Dutch trader had “gone head to head with rich gentry.” What, and not drunk their milk shake?

For the one required class on campus Freshman year we were required to read Beloved which I found to be a self-indulgent and arrogant piece of literary crap. I have never been able to understand why Toni Morrison gets the praise that she does for her novels while other American writers simply get overshadowed.

Link to the original article.

Just when I thought I had read everything up on The Atlantic’s website right now I came across a wonderful piece by James Warren concerning the frighteningly increasing decline of newspapers and traditional print journalism. In it he writes that:

This matters because of the unique role journalism plays in a democracy. So much public information and official government knowledge depends on a private business model that is now failing. Journalism acknowledges and illuminates complexity, and at the same time prioritizes, helping us to evaluate the relative significance of developments playing out all around us. A very shrewd journalist-entrepreneur I know, Steve Brill, asks that one just imagine walking into a library and seeing the pages of all the books scattered on the floors and stairwells. To be sure, editors are human and subjectivity plays a role, but a newspaper places those pages—and thus the news—in some sensible order.

And, importantly, there’s a sense of social mission. Good journalism keeps public and private officials honest and helps citizens make thoughtful decisions. It does this by systematically gathering, processing, and checking relevant information, and by doing it with a spirit of independence. It’s how two previously unknown Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, put together the Watergate puzzle that forced the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon.

While I do think that much of the problems that are currently inherent to print journalism have been self-created by the industry I nonetheless find it sad every time that I read about a newspaper laying off hundreds of workers. Like Warren says in his article the reality is that many of the most trafficked sites on the internet rely heavily upon newspapers for their content and reporting; were it not for newspapers I believe that some of the sites he lists (Huffington, etc.) would not have anywhere near the content they need for survival. As an addict of news and reading in general I find it personally sad that I would lose sources like the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post.

The next few years will certainly be interesting ones (and hopefully not too depressing of ones) for print journalism and I just really hope that at least some of the large print institutions survive and provide a model for others to follow in the rebuilding of newspapers.

Link to the full Atlantic article.

In “Discipline and Punish” he writes:

It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration.

Just found that interesting in light of all of these discussion concerning the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the United States’ role in extradition and torture.

Another interesting quote I found while reading the first chapter of Deleuz and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”:

Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit an to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (page 7)

I simply found this interesting because I found it to be quite relevant to my feelings toward the teaching and learning of languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. I’ve always been troubled by the way that we do not fully comprehend the structure or construction of these languages, but yet we still make assumptions about language usage and meaning. I believe that we do this by breaking the languages down into a single realm of meaning that may or may not have been applicable or relevant for the general populous of the time.

The Daily Dish has an interesting article up about the future of books and Google’s effort to digitize them. Andrew Sullivan quotes another writer who wrote of the recent settlement allowing Google to digitize thousands of books that:

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company.

Here’s the link to the original article that Sullivan pulls from which is also an interesting read although it is quite long.