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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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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    Nay, ’tis strange, ’tis very strange, that is the brief and the tedious of it. All’s Well That Ends Well, II, iii   Here in The Prime of Miss Jane Friedman, I surely hope you took in the comments following the excellent Writing she Unboxed here yesterday. Fiddler on the You Know What [...]

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The oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. Antony & Cleopatra, II, 2   It was St. Paddy’s Eve, after all, when London-based agent Bonnie Jonny Geller let out with his Agent’s Manifesto. This prominent man [...]

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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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