The Mumpsimus

I am just coming to the news that Mark Woods, who ran the wood s lot site, died in February . I'd not been reading wood s lot regularly for a while — life got complex, internet reading more fragmented, and wood s lot  was just too rich, too full, too much: I hated skimming it, because it was material that needed to be absorbed more fully, more thoughtfully. I regret that, and am glad that the archives survive. I can't overstate the effect of wood s lot  on me in the early days of blogging here. (The consistent quality of the site is awe-inspiring. I look back through my own archives here and mostly think I'm looking at the doodles of a child. Read through the archives of wood s lot  and from the beginning you'll perceive a sharp mind arranging the signs and sights of the universe.) In the scrappy days before social networks and corporate bloggers, Mark Woods' site and David Auerbach's Waggish  offered a literary seriousness that made online writing see...

Not from David Foster Wallace. Not Ulysses . (photo via Tony Shafrazi ) I, too, immediately thought, "Wow!" when I saw it. I, too, accepted the idea that it must be David Foster Wallace's copy of Ulysses , because, well ... you've heard of David Foster Wallace, right? I'm teaching a course in literary analysis in the fall and so am collecting whatever images I can find of the ways (reasonable or absurd) that serious readers annotate what they read. I zoomed in on the image to see if I could figure out the logic (or illogic) of it. But the pages didn't look like Ulysses to me. Nor, for that matter, did the style of annotation resemble what we know of DFW's style from the books at the Ransom Center . I zoomed in, and though the resolution was quite low, I made out what seemed to be two names: Maureen O'Sullivan and, at the top, Robert Mitchum. It looked to me like a biography of Robert Mitchum. It was easy enough to use Google Books to find a...

I think the SOPA / PIPA internet blackout protest is a useful way to increase the public's awareness of legislation that has a potential to really affect the way the internet is structured. It's a "publicity stunt" , indeed, because one of the goals of most protest actions is to increase public awareness of the protestors' point of view. Inconveniencing folks is a good way to do that. Pure inconvenience is counterproductive, though. The inconvenience has to be mixed with informing the inconvenienced people about your point of view. That's why the various sites blacking themselves out are also providing links to information and ways for folks in the U.S. to contact their legislators. I find the arguments against SOPA/PIPA convincing, and though some good and powerful people have come out against these specific bills, that doesn't mean the bills are dead , and even if it did, a show of solidarity against such bills can't be a bad thing. There a...