Some random stuff marginally related to ebooks:
- David Rothman wrote a long personal piece about his life and career as a journalist. (He composed it in interview form, with one of his literary creations from Solomon Scandals conducting the interview). Lots of interesting tidbits which never made it on Teleread: a ham radio conversation with Barry Goldwater, a brief stint with the National Enquirer and his feelings of kinship with political novelist Henry Adams. He paraphrases Norman Mailer’s maxim that “writers aren’t smart enough to be doctors or good-looking enough to be actors.” (Damn, is that why I never receive any callbacks at those movie auditions?)
- Economist Tyler Cowen asks why people write inside print books. I’ll ask it another way: why do the majority of people never write in the books they buy?
- The free online notetaking application Evernote now has a free iPad version . (See a video demo).
- I’ve coined a new acronym: AFSE .
- Roger Ebert writes that videogames can never be art. 2700+ commenters disagree with him. Roger Ebert asks: Art is not an academic subject. It is a state of perception. Is there a reason a lover of Beethoven, Shakespeare, van Gogh or Dickens should play even one video game rather than move on to Mozart, Beckett, Picasso or Tolstoy? What video game should I substitute for Beethoven’s Ninth? Remember, life is short.
- EFF’s Brad Templeton notes that Hitler parodies are starting to get taken down from Youtube. (this news may be old, I don’t know).
- Did you know John Cleese used to do commercials for Compaq Computers in the 1980s? Also here and here.
- If you’re looking for a free title to download from the iBooks store, a good thing to try would be Flash Fiction 40 Anthology (a Smashwords book). The free Top 100s by Year is a cool & free iPad app.
- From the Keywest Literary Seminars audio archive, a fun hour long talk by Gore Vidal who reminisces about his days with Amelia Earhart.
- Good podcasts from the Writing Show with Paula B. Writing the Humorous Memoir, Writing Flash Fiction and Ficbot’s own “ebook complaining” interview.
I use Evernote a great deal. One of these days I should write up how I use it in conjunction with Dropbox and VoiceEmotion in doing my interviews and articles for the local business journal.
Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Ebert and his jihad against video games. He’s an expert on movies; I’ll listen to him about movies. Every expert who tries to speak outside his field invariably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (And people didn’t think movies were “art” when they were first invented either.)