April 16, 2009

| Bill Reads Books >>

Some people keep tabs open in their browser for days or weeks; I keep them open in my well-loved RSS reader NetNewsWire. (NNW doubles as a browser; I almost certainly do more READING of web content there than in Firefox.)

I like it — it keeps the old stuff next to the new stuff, and puts little pictures of what I want to read or re-read. I usually use MarsEdit to blog stuff, and MarsEdit is really well integrated with NetNewsWire, so it’s a good workflow to keep things open that I want to post to Snarkmarket eventually, or to make some other use of. (MarsEdit doesn’t play nice with Movable Type 3.2 [edit - but see below], which is why I occasionally have crazy characters in my posts for smart quotes, apostrophes, em-dashes, usw.)

Anyways, like any other workflow, this one gets backed up; I can’t think of exactly what I want to say, or (more often) other stuff gets in the way. But I think it’s still good to take some time to register the things I’m thinking about, because you might want to think about them too. Here’s what’s still in my inbox.

• if:book, “design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts argument.” E-book readers and phenomenology? Content, thy name is Carmody. Disappointingly, author Dan Piepenbring hasn’t actually read a lot of Heidegger, so the argument is a little underdeveloped (check my comment down the thread). I really want to blog about this, but I also wanted effectively to remake the whole idea from scratch, and I don’t have the time right now to do that.
• CFP for Wordless Modernism at MSA 11. Academic CFP listservs come in RSS form now! This is so, so sweet. So is the CFP here: “If, as W.J.T. Mitchell has argued, the ‘linguistic turn’ of the early twentieth century took place alongside a concomitant ‘pictorial turn,’ how does this change the way we approach modernism