Reviews and other ponderings
See the ‘My sinful earth’ bit at the end of the first line repeated at the start of the second? Some editors replace the repeated words with dots like this: [...]. Wikipedia talks about it here. I remember being amazed when I found out about this: I had read the sonnet many time without realising [...]
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a Nineteenth century art movement which thought that art had taken a wrong turn around the time of Raphael. A friend and I once formed a two man movement of our own: The Pre-Gutenberg Brotherhood. It is difficult to make ourselves aware of all the things that we take for granted, [...]
From Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin [...]
Bitesizeedits is a fun site where random people edit and correct random little chunks of text. It’s really fun, and I thought I would submit one of my blog posts as a bit of an experiment, to see what would result from letting strangers hack around with my words. I got to approve the changes, [...]
This is a piece I wrote for a fanzine called ‘Proust Said That’ in (about) 1994. Since, sadly, the fanzine has passed on, I thought I would rescue my bit from the Way Back Machine and reclaim it. I was very excited at the time: the internet was brand new, and people were actually publishing [...]
Something I noticed when I read (or was read, http://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/) Moby-Dick, was that Herman Melville seems quite taken with recursive things – a lamp lit by whale oil, illuminating people who were eating whale steak; sharks that eat themselves in a frenzy, and a couple of other things. At the time, it stood out, but [...]
When Steve Jobs saw the first LaserWriter, in 1982, he seems to have had one of his great moments of insight. He knew that this was going to change the world. In fact, he immediately tried to buy the company, Adobe, who had invented it, but they turned him down. Undeterred, he got Apple to [...]
I have been doing quite a bit of design work on my computer in last couple of days, and it really helps me to concentrate my eyes if my ears are busy. So, I usually listed to a podcast or something as I work. Today, I listened to a few TED talks. I have always [...]