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1. If you missed last night’s live reading/q&a with Grace Krilanovich, it is now available for archived viewing here (in multiple parts, below the live feed screen).

2. Richard Nash announces Red Lemonade, the first imprint of his new Cursor publishing apparatus, including three compelling titles: Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman (Apr 2011), Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (May 2011), and Follow Me Down Kio Stark (June 2011).

3. Timothy Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation gets a 2 page review in the latest issue of the New Yorker (partial preview online): “…In Donnelly’s hands, we feel again that we live again in a universe with a god.”

4. Giancarlo DiTrapano writes about cluster headaches at Thought Catalog.

5. Arthur Neresian & Tony O’Neill will be reading together at the NYU Bookstore on Wednesday, Oct. 20th at 7pm.

4. We now have an HTMLGIANT group on Facebook you can ‘like,’ if you feel like that.

Roundup / 2 Comments
October 12th, 2010 / 3:33 pm

HTMLGIANT Features

Sartre publishes “The Wall” on his facebook wall

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54 Comments
September 7th, 2010 / 6:23 pm

Linguistic Darwinism: Can a brand name kill the thing it was named after?

Before Facebook, there were facebooks. When I was in college, “the facebook” was one name for the (ink and paper) Pomona student handbook’s most-perused section, the photo directory of incoming freshman. Other designations were the lookbook and, more crudely but most aptly, the menu. Plenty of schools had them and many also called them the facebook. Facebook corporate mythology has it that founder Mark Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook from the facebook issued by his high school alma mater, Phillips-Exeter. In any case, this kind of directory is surely what the company was named after.

Presumably, college students don’t need facebooks anymore because they have Facebook. I doubt they’ve been totally phased out, but I do wonder if they are still colloquially referred to as facebooks. Wouldn’t that be too confusing?

There are plenty of cases when a brand name became the de-facto generic name for something, like Kleenex or Coke (at least here in Atlanta) or Oreo. But this is a different phenomenon, wherein the brand name takes a generic thing’s name and applies it to a new form of that thing, thereby making the generic name and thing obsolete.

My father frequently uses the construction “all a-twitter.” Twitter is, after all, a verb meaning to make successive chirping noises (hence the Twitter bird icon) or  to tremble with excitement (my dad’s usage is somewhat of an amalgam). Surely, much as people don’t say “gay” to mean “happy” anymore, uses of the generic verb twitter–when not in reference to micro-blogging–will diminish to nothing. But this still isn’t as extreme as the Facebook example, in that people are no less happy for not being called gay, and birds cheep no less for not being described as twittering, whereas colleges really might stop printing their own facebooks now that there is one big Facebook.

I’d love to hear if anyone can think of any other examples of this phenomenon, especially older examples–or was Facebook the first to murder its forebears?

Random / 35 Comments
July 28th, 2010 / 2:09 pm

THE FACEBOOK MOVIE

I actually think this looks great.

Film / 96 Comments
July 15th, 2010 / 1:32 pm

The Inclusion of ME

In the comments of an earlier post today, Justin Taylor referred to the concept of people commenting over and getting upset about things in relation to ‘the inclusion of ME,’ which he is dead-on right, is often a big reason anyone whines about anything in writing. Writers, by nature, are often a very self-obsessed and self-aware bunch (‘Oh cool, nice on your story coming out, I have one coming out too…’) and probably somewhat in many cases by sheer means of survival, in that it’s such a slim game already. But I also think that this phenomenon, while perhaps at least in some way bent in their own mind to keep them afloat, is not only often troublesome and awkward, but part of the reason why in the end many writers give up.

There’s no argument that to get work published over time, no matter who you are, really, (unless you’re like Salman Rushdie’s son) takes a hell of a struggle. There are a limited number of venues out there and definitely limitless folks with things they want to say, so the idea that someone should get upset or angry about receiving, say, a form rejection letter ignoring their work (no matter what the reasons they feel this happened are) is ludicrous. Sure, it stings some, but in the end, we’re really all just people in the same boat and things happen for a reason. It’s an achingly cringe-worthy thing when people take it as a personal affront, or believe there is a conspiracy against them wherein the editors only publish their friends (which, yeah, definitely happens, and probably a lot, but there are reasons for this, which I will head into after the jump…)

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Web Hype / 8 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 1:22 pm