Syllabus

McSweeneys has a very helpful internet age writing syllabus and course overview here:  

ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era; M-W-F: 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert Lanham

Prerequisites: Students must have completed at least two of the following.

ENG: 232WR — Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll

LIT: 223 — Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less

ENG: 102 — Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking

ENG: 301 — Advanced Blog and Book Skimming

ENG: 231WR — Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance

LIT: 202 — The Literary Merits of Lolcats

LIT: 209 — Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

Thanks to Bookslut for the link.

Outsourcing writing skills

Some incipient research from Microsoft that aims to transform prose written by authors and writers helping them choose between alternative ways to express textual ideas.
I was wondering when will they come up with automated fiction writing? Or better still, a software tool that analyzes brain patterns amongst the random thoughts occurring inside a writers head and then cobbling together a work of fiction or non-fiction? All a budding author needs to do is to sit back and think up something and presto, comes a story.

In suggesting that writers replace content words, we thus take a great deal of risk: a poor choice can dramatically alter the meaning of a sentence - or provoke unintended hilarity. The project goal is not to improve the work of poets, professional novelists, or anyone else who considers their writing art. We’re focused primarily on helping users who are writing to achieve a more pragmatic goal – say a project report, a term paper, or an email – and who would like a little assistance in order to find the right words. ..The tool can even attempt to rewrite an entire sentence, selecting among different combinations of word and phrase replacements to choose the contextually most plausible set of all substitutions proposed by the models.

Text with drawing of Tower of Babel. (1400-1499). From the renaissance and medieval manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library

What is good for the goose is good for the...

New Yorker's Andy Borowitz has an interesting take on why he is "too big to fail" and makes his case for a bailout.

This is the first time I have ever asked for a bailout from the Federal Reserve. I know what you’re thinking. Why do I deserve your largesse, and I do mean largesse, since I’m asking for five million big ones? The answer is simple. Like many of our nation’s financial institutions, I am simply too big to fail.

Folkert de Jong's sculptural tableau. The Shooting...At Watou; 1st July 2006 on display at the James Cohan Gallery (between Sept 6 - Oct 4th 2008)

Ran into an interesting statistic this morning

I know members of our close family and other acquaintances with advanced degrees waiting in line to obtain working visas so that they could come and work here in the United States. These visas are called H-1B visas and are typically given to professions that require a large amount of technical skill and degrees in engineering, medicine, arts and law. Usually the visas are granted with a reason explaining why the person was hired. The problem is that the government has a cap of about 65,000 visas issued each year resulting in a lot of missed opportunities, deadlines and dreams. The following factoid that I came across in the latest issue of Harpers from their monthly column ‘Harper's index’ struck me as something combining satire, circumlocution and euphemism:

"Number of H-1B visas, for workers with a 'body of highly specialized knowledge' granted to fashion models last year: 349"

Lydia Venieri's ‘War Games’ at the Stefan Stux Gallery (Sept – Oct 07)