Vacation looms, and I've been too excited about it to think any thoughts more interesting than "Whee!". Tomorrow I'm off for a week or so of travel, including a trip to Santa Fe for two operas and assorted sightseeing. I'll catch you all when I get back, at which point I'll no doubt be hyperventilating […]
Via Matthew Battles' Twitter feed comes Cinco Cidades, a "cross-disciplinary project documenting the cultures and sounds of five cities across Portugal." Each of the five cities has its own map showing where the various sound files—children playing, street noise, birdsong, local musicians, conversation, bells, subways, construction, residents talking to interviewers—were recorded. What makes the site […]
It's hard to write a good fictional scene involving characters reading. As A.S. Byatt authorially interjects in the passage I'm about to quote from her novel Possession: A Romance, one risks pulling the reader into a "mise-en-abîme … where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum." And yet […]