Hypertext autobiography, a lifetime of Joyce, chatbots, botox, feuds, Perry nostalgia, and luddites
The irregular book review review. vol. II
Welcome to the irregular book review review. Paid subscribers receive links to interesting literary essays, approximately once a month. I will offer a short commentary, either on the essay or the topic. As you can see below, this ranges from recommending modern book culture to internet autobiography to book technology to the best spats between artists to Matthew Perry.
Hypertext autobiography
Heartbreaking account of the first blogger, and a surely under-rated, inventive autobiographer. I loved this essay. Full of compelling detail.
Chatbot books
Publishers are considering how to have a chatbot version of each book they release. Good! If nothing else, I want to be able to interrogate, search, and talk with the books I have read. Obviously, there’s no substitute for reading; but look around, people aren’t reading like they used to. It seems likely that you will be able to use a chatbot for books before Oxford University Press lets you read the Collected Letters of Samuel Johnson online for free. The internet is here! Please use it!
A lifetime of Joyce
“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”
DJ botox merch
These book launch parties sound unendurable, but this article is full of interesting detail. Oh to live in a world where the book was the marketing!
“Writers like Claudia Dey, author of Daughter, and Rachel Rabbit White, author of Porn Carnival, are marrying the worlds of their books with custom perfumes from cult-favorite perfumers Courtney Rafuse and Marissa Zappas, respectively. Madeline Cash made custom merchandise for her addictive-as-a-candy-flavored-vape short story collection Earth Angel. So did Nada Alic, who also created a series of “book trailers,” short films to drum up interest in her sharp, salve-for-the-spirit short story collection Bad Thoughts.”
Lit fits
Art spats from Berlioz to modern rappers, framed through the story of Paglia and Sontag. Good discussion about works of art Christians disapprove of, which have been made by Christians:
“it is strange that a number of the artists whose work has been attacked by Christians—Chris Ofili (The Holy Virgin Mary), Andreas Serrano (Piss Christ), Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader (The Last Temptation of Christ), for example—in fact identify as Christians themselves.”
Perry nostalgia
In her discussion of Matthew Perry, Katherine Dee is right that art is a medium of nostalgia. “To say we’re in an era of remixing is just another way of describing the method by which cultural innovation has always worked — it’s not an indictment on our ability to express ourselves in new ways.”
Book technology
Why don’t books incorporate modern technology? We have left the Gutenberg Parenthesis and it continues to mystify me why publishers have refused to incorporate audio and video in their products.