books: May 2004 Archives

This won't be a shock to many of you since you've already probably heard, but I can say now that it's official. As of today (yesterday, really), I am now officially contracted with Hampton Press for my first book, Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media. It was accepted into Cindy Selfe's and Gail Hawisher's series on "New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies," the same series that's publishing Johndan's Datacloud.

I heard from Gail and Cindy a couple of weeks ago, but figured I should wait to say anything "official" until I actually put pen to paper.

And now to put fingers to keyboard...

No, not this blog.

According to Telegraph: publication of first-ever novel without verbs (verb as weed, in quote above), "The Train from Nowhere." A French author (Michel Thaler), of course. Necessarily, a great deal of interior monologue and framgentary sentences--"Instead of action, lengthy passages [of] florid adjectives in a series of vitriolic portraits of dislikeable passengers on a train" (Telegraph). An interesting thought experiment, if nothing else. Given pedagogical goals of attention to language, even a potentially useful or productive experiment for a FY composition course?

Tough to say. Fine lines among implicit verbs, nominalizations, gerunds, etc.--worth the trouble? And on top of that, an annoyingly pompous author:

"I am like a car driver who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see into the future, smashed the rear-view mirror so he cannot see the past, and is travelling in the present."

Ummm, yeah. "A revolution in the history of literature," or imminent 6-car pile-up? Tomato, to-mah-to. Bon chance, Michel!

[via kottke]