Jack King's Blog, page 6
March 21, 2015
Reading and Writing are Crucial in Humanitarian Emergencies
“In humanitarian emergencies, reading and writing are essential to healing and reconstruction.
While there is no question that organizations and governments must devote the majority of their efforts to promoting the physical wellbeing of disaster victims, more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward.
The importance of food, emergency supplies, and shelter, after a natural disaster, cannot be underestimated. Bu...
March 20, 2015
Writers Have a Huge Responsibility
“Literature matters. […]
It’s like this. When you read, you are involved in a private transaction between, on the one hand, you, and on the other, the book and the person standing behind the book, the author.
The act of reading brings two separate energies together. One is the text which is made by the writer, and other is your personality into which the text is imported. Reading merges you and the text together and once that union has been effected it can never be undone. The two are meshed....
March 13, 2015
Book Publishing Industry Survives Without Big Data
But can it continue?
“It is one of the cruel truisms of the book business that publishers rarely have much insight into how their products are actually used. This is not for lack of curiosity on a publisher’s part but because of the structure of the industry: books are almost never sold directly to end-users. They are sold to libraries and the wholesalers that service libraries; they are sold to your local bookshop; and they are sold to online vendors; but rarely is a book sold directly by a...
March 4, 2015
Striving for Immortality
“Writers live lives of curious contradiction.Their work succeeds only by means of a monastic interiority and lonesomeness, and yet they yearn for that work to deliver them the very things most likely to murder it: whole continents of fans, invitations to claim and cash fantastical checks. They’ve heard the warning that says celebrity is one of the toxins which contributes to a writer’s artistic contamination, but they can’t help themselves—writers spend lots of time being overlooked, and thus...
January 7, 2015
Reading – a Bridge to Self
“What does reading do?”
“You can learn almost everything from reading.”
“But I read too.”
“So you must know something.”
“Now I’m not so sure.”
“You’ll have to read differently then.”
“How?
“The same method doesn’t work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and t...
January 6, 2015
The FBI’s First Double Agent
William “Sebold, a German native born in 1899, served in his nation’s army during World War I then lived in the United States and South America before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1936. Three years later, during a visit to his homeland, Sebold was recruited to spy on the United States for Germany. The Nazis, who had learned he once worked briefly at an airplane factory in California, threatened him if he failed to cooperate. Sebold secretly went to the American consulate in Cologne...
Writers, Surveillance, and Self-Censorship
“Writers are reluctant to speak about, write about, or conduct research on topics that they think may draw government scrutiny. This has a devastating impact on freedom of information as well: If writers avoid exploring topics for fear of possible retribution, the material available to readers—particularly those seeking to understand the most controversial and challenging issues facing the world today—may be greatly impoverished.”
… “according to the survey, writers living in countries defined...
January 3, 2015
The Relationship between Math and Literature
How can a literary work “have infinite critical interpretations, while at the same time not all its interpretations are critical”?
To answer this seemingly contradictory question one must look to mathematics:
Infinite Interpretations of Literary Works
One of the main things critics of literature do is to interpret literary works. In the past, the notion that a literary work, say a novel, only has one real meaning was widely accepted. But, with the dawn of positivism and the ascension of hermeneu...
December 13, 2014
Living in a Screen World
We are spending too much time in front of various screens, instead of reading books, to the detriment of our brains.
“To illustrate the neurological effect of this imbalance, we can adapt Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about “hot” and “cool” media: the screen delivers its communication piping hot, in fully cooked messages. If it’s a tree, it looks like a tree ��� no decoding required. Moreover, the screen delivers fully formed stories, with actors, sets and all other manner of visual stimuli and nar...
