A Momentary Taste of Being

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature This may be old news to some, but I thought the list interesting and certainly something that was tweetable.  (I wonder if that is anything like treatable, because this list of symptoms does not appear to be.)

Via Frank Wilson, a conversation on Postmodernity

This is just gorgeous ; I hope the excerpt shows well.  Analyzing language in metabooks.  And as they say in the math books--This is intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers; the proof is left to the student. from " The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language" in The New Journal of Physics Sebastian Bernhardsson 1 , Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha and Petter Minnhagen The second assumption (equation ( 3 )), with γ > 1, gives the relation The last case in equation ( 7 ) (β < 1) can be disregarded as impossible since γ needs to be smaller than one for the integral to be positive, which means that α is also negative. This would give a book where the number of different words decreases as a function of the total number of words. I have to admit to being very partial to the intrinsic beauty of the integral symbol--and indeed to much of the symbology of mathematics in general.  Even whe...

I'm fairly certain it isn't a criminal offense, at least in most countries. . . from Excursions in the Real World William Trevor Being Irish is complicated, in my case, by the fact that I am a writer of fiction. One circumstance influences the other; nationality seems irrelevant in the loose, uncharted world of art, then suddenly raises its voice; fiction insists on universality, then equally insists that a degree of parochialism can often best achieve this. A muddle of contradiction prevails, but since the practice of any art has to do with establishing order, muddles should be grist to the artistic mill. Or so at least you can pretend. Writing is a professional activity, yet when fiction is the end product it must necessarily also be a personal one. As you engage in it you cannot escape the person you are. I think the critical point here is how universality is achieved.  It seems to me that it is almost always achieved in the particular.  Hamlet is not the prince of...