Should Creative Writing Be Taught?
From The New Yorker, June 8, 2009, by Louis Mendand
The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.
More at The New Yorker. . . .
RAPTURE FOR THE GEEKS: (RETAIL)
END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA)
Published: October 7th, 2008
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Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, by Richard Dooling.
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by Richard Dooling on August 26, 2008
in Technology
Survival Of The Smartest: Will Geeks Inherit The Earth?
Purchase From Amazon.
Media Coverage of Rapture For The Geeks:
- Sunday New York Times Op-Ed, “The Rise of the Machines,” by Richard Dooling.
- Jeremy Lott reviews Rapture For The Geeks at Ars Technica.
- The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
- The New York Observer, Digital Doomsday, by Gillian Reagan.
- Thomas Edsall discusses Man Versus Machine and Richard Dooling’s “New York Times Op-Ed, The Rise of the Machines,” at The Huffington Post.
- Ferris Jabr puts Rapture For The Geeks on Pyschology Today’s bookshelf.
- Daniel Kennelly discusses Rapture For The Geeks, Richard Dawkins, and atheist-baiting at Doublethink Online.
- David Takami reviews Rapture For The Geeks in the Seattle Times.
- The Independent, Keen On New Media: The New Master of the Universe, by Andrew Keen.
- Bibliolicious.com.
- Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal interviews Richard Dooling on American Public Media’s Marketplace program.
- Listen to Richard Dooling discuss Rapture For The Geeks on Coast To Coast Radio with George Noory, Monday, September 29th, from 11pm-2am Pacific.
- Publisher’s Weekly review of Rapture For The Geeks.
Your User Profile
(Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.)
User, noun. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” –Dave Barry
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users.” –Edward Tufte
It’s time to launch the web browser of your imagination and surf the undiscovered future of technology, but first a few questions to assist you in formulating your user profile.
Are you addicted to your computer? To the Internet? To e-mail? To your Treo, iPhone, or CrackBerry? To computer gaming? Or maybe to computer programming? Perhaps you’re not addicted (and you don’t overeat or drink too much or take drugs), maybe you just like to configure and personalize your favorite software, until it does just what you want it to do, just the way you want it done. Do you tweak the options and widgets and custom codes on your Blogspot or your WordPress weblog for hours on end, until your little corner of the Internet is “clean” and well-designed? Have you logged onto the MySpace at 2 A.M. asking, “Help! I can’t get my marquee scroll generator to work! How can I make my table backgrounds transparent, the border invisible, my photos appear to hover, and my hyperlinks underlined and 12-point Garamond?” Are you the type who customizes menus, macros, and toolbars for hours at a time, sometimes for more hours than you’ll ever spend actually doing the task you had in mind when you started the program?
Here’s the big question: Do you ever feel that you once used computers and computer programs as tools to get a specific job done, but lately you wonder if Dave Barry was onto something when he wrote: “I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.”
[click to continue…]
