Critical Linking: July 30, 2012

So I’m pulling ALL my work from the iBookstore today. I apologize to iBookstore fans. I tried. Hard.

This is one thing I think readers won’t stand; digital distributors of books blocking titles because of content that is not only  legal, but completely unobjectionable except that it might strengthen a competitor. If this is accurate, it needs to change. Now.

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I want you, all of the gatekeepers, to become fans. I want you to become true enthusiasts like me. I want you to become thrill-seekers…

This was written about people who produce comedy, but seems good advice for publishing, no?

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A few days ago, I was visiting my father in the hospital. My sister was there, reading Fifty Shades of Grey (with our father lying asleep a few feet away!). Is it old-fashioned of me to think this is probably not appropriate reading material in this situation, or really any public setting? Am I simply being too prudish?

I don’t know….do you consider it old-fashioned to churn butter? How about biting on a stick during dental work?

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The idea that technology (“the Machine”) is a kind of magic, or at least deeply related to magic, is one that Tolkien shared with his close friend C. S. Lewis, who argued that, in the early modern period, “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve.”

Being afraid of technology goes back to the earliest Western literature, when the gods got pissed at Apollo for using these new-fangled arrow things.