Vol. 1 Brooklyn | More Intelligent Life

Bites: Reading Rainbow, Doctorow’s latest, a Twitter opera, and more

On September 2, 2009 By Willa A. Cmiel

R.I.P. Butterfly in the Sky. (If you can’t place the line, Reading Rainbow is dead.) E.L Doctorow’s new novel Homer and Langley is ready, and reviewers can’t stop comparing it to Ragtime. Okay, he’s a “special genius for ellipsis,” blah blah blah. Whatever, “the scandalous allure of a New York tabloid series” is totally exciting to me. On the High Line, there is a new art installation visible especially at night. While not naked hotel-guests, the exhilerating sense of that Chelsea voyeurism still lingers. Eek. More Intelligent Life begs the mildly banal question “What happens to opera when people have their way?”. The noisome answer: “A new full-length libretto from public tweets.” Pitchfork talks to Dario Roberto, the artist responsible for the artwork on Yo La Tengo’s upcoming album, Popular Songs. And finally, The strange, persistent demand for T-shirts featuring “urbanized” cartoon characters.

Cosigning: Twitter is Not Apocalyptic (Neither is This Blog)

On July 9, 2009 By Jason Diamond

Anne Trubek, a Rhetoric and Comp professor at Oberlin, considers social media in an optimistic light for More Intelligent Life. From her essay “We Are All Writers Now”:

My friends and I write more than we used to, often more than we talk. We correspond with each other and to colleagues, school teachers, utility companies. We send e-mails to our local newspaper reporters about their stories; we write to magazine editors to tell them what we think. And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms. Who would not welcome shorter, funnier prose?

I like seeing optimistic writing about social networking. Nostalgia can be wonderful, but it can also eclipse or mislabel important contemporary minutiae in the name of posterity. Critics of Trubek’s essay might cite her decision to dismiss the problems faced with improper fact-checking and the unreliability of citizen journalists on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Her piece, though, is not meant to be a comprehensive review of social media. Although news and thoughts are now published at the click of a button, there will always be writers painstakingly analyzing word choices and references. Social media is not the downfall of the written word. I’m just saying.

Picture credit via More Intelligent Life: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (via Flickr)

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Bites: Reading Rainbow, Doctorow’s latest, a Twitter opera, and more

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