Five Quite Recent Provocations Langdon gasped. If he’d deciphered the symbols correctly, Jesus had married Joan of Arc at Stonehenge! If not, it was a recipe for meatloaf. — Dan Vinci’s Nunferno (@Nunferno) May 24, 2013 Provocation One: Man Booker Irrational? When the American novelist Lydia Davis was given the £60,000 Man Booker International this [...]

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Do you go to conferences? Boy, I do. One of the greatest aspects of conference-going is meeting people you might have known only on the ether, putting a face to the avatar. Here, for example, is author Chuck Wendig, whom I’ve met several times at conferences. Both of us normally have some traveling to do, to [...]

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Convenience comes at the cost of a grave loss: that of the book as a symbol, as an artifact of learning, poise, wisdom and moral fortitude. While this loss may seem trivial, a simple matter of changing times and customs, the symbols we are losing permeate society and have long been shaping the fortunes of [...]

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  I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say. – Marshall McLuhan   I’ve been putting together some thoughts recently on our collective readership. Not us when we read. Not our delegation here of Unboxed Writers. And not even the wider community of writers, local and offshore, national and intergalactic, the diaspora-digital, and where it [...]

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Even our photos of a church group, or a friend’s birthday, or exercise at the YMCA are, if we admit it, about us. Every photo is a “selfie.” Alex Miller Jr., The Myth of Narcissus Goes Social If you donated money to a hurricane relief charity via a website, you may have been asked if [...]

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      The oddness of Twitter…meeting people for the first time who seem like old friends at #bib12 — Ania Wieckowski (@agwieckowski) October 25, 2012   Ania Wieckowski, Harvard Business Review’s Managing Editor, is nothing if not a poised tweeter. She sweetly tweeted this — or tweetly sweeted it — at this week’s continually [...]

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Though our publishers will tell you that they are ever seeking “original” writers, nothing could be farther from the truth. What they want is more of the same, only thinly disguised. They most certainly do not want another Faulkner, another Melville, another Thoreau, another Whitman. What the public wants, no one knows. Not even the [...]

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  Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. And how does a shadow career relate to a real career? That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Something that supports what I meant to do. Good training? Yes, it sure is. This will come in [...]

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It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world…In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news. Marshall McLuhan, January 4, 1961 The Practical Side of Marshall McLuhan From Marshall & Me   Proposition: Practically speaking, it’s hard to speak practically on our social [...]

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    O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour… Sonnet 126       The so-called “social” media, currently our lovely boy of communication, hold in their darting packets of data, surely, unimaginable power. They collapse distance across continents and seas we once showed on [...]

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