Fungible Convictions

I head home to D.C. for Christmas tonight, and I’m hoping, somewhat, that I don’t get the urge to post to FC on my vacation. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile!

For readers

The Institute for the Future of the Book just released a robustly commentable version of the Iraq Study Group Report. Come for the report; stay for the brilliant commenting system, which I’m sure they hope will catch on for other long-form writing online. Basically it lets you comment on individual paragraphs. They’re still writing the code to allow user to more easily find and read new comments, but it’s a heck of a start. Imagine using something similar to workshop a fiction piece electronically.

For writers

Stumped for information on a topic you’re writing about? Need a new avenue to explore? Try Google Scholar. Not only does it index and link to full-text research papers on anything you might be writing about, it also links out to related research via keywords—so there’s always inspiration for what to investigate next.

Tin House: “This Girl Needs a Spanking”, a reflection on The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer—yes, the Twin Peaks Laura Palmer.

A literary festival in Newburyport, Mass., has been announced. Set aside April 28 and 29 for what will be a cathartic couple of days—the Boston area has long been ripe for a literary festival, but no one had put one together until now.

One of the attendees for the Newburyport Literary Festival is friend and poet Bill Coyle, who just won The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Congratulations, Bill. His manuscript The God of This World to His Prophet will be published this fall.

I just discovered The Institute for the Future of the Book. Should be a good fellow traveler.

The full research paper on the Sony DRM debacle was published. It deserves time to be digested but will certainly be a key reference for the digital rights debate in the coming months.

Yahoo has created a developer network, giving anyone quick access to code Yahoo employs every day. This will be unbelievably valuable to green-horned and experienced developers alike.

BoingBoing continues to argue that Google Book Search is good for publishers. I continue to agree. A quote:

[Publishers] argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back — but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn’t get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn’t enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you’re improving.

Rick Moody in A Public Space: “But one can’t excuse inflating three hours in jail into 87 days in jail. Such license is too much. When I wrote my own memoir, I worked my ass off to make sure that everything I included was true to the best of my knowledge.”

How to write good e-mails. While some of the tips are now well known bits of e-mail etiquette—like avoiding all caps—tips like #8 (Don’t Fabricate Unanswerable Questions) are new, valuable, and right-on.

AGNI: The Waterwheel. AGNI again publishes a great piece of translated, near-forgotten poetry.

N+1: Review of Bernard Herni-Levi’s do-over of Tocqueville’s travels. It’s not a positive review of American Vertigo, and, in fact, I haven’t seen a positive review of it yet. If indeed it’s so bad, my guess is because a Frenchman nowadays doesn’t have an interesting perspective for looking at America, not like Tocqueville did. To replicate his trip, you’d need to send an aristocratic American to travel India or China. Can we resurrect George Plimpton already?

Ploughshares, “The Heiress from Horn Lake” by Katherine Taylor: “I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi.”