Literally

Literally – the much misused word of the moment
from The Guardian's Mind Your Language blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/jan/29/literally-a-much-misused-word

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But as Anthony Burgess once said, the poet and the pedant are as one, and grammar is glamour. So let's be poetical. Let's indulge ourselves in some glamour.

....Writers such as Bellow, Joyce and Rushdie remind us of the fundamentally comic nature of life. That's not comic as in "ha ha" comedy (there's little to laugh about in those Bellow lines), but something more essential – a mood perhaps, maybe even a quality of vision. It has to do with life's potential for adjustability and transformation; with a reality of shifting proportions, surprising angles, creative awrynesses. The comic world is above all an inclusive world. It is also opposite to the tragic view of a harsh and prohibitive world, where the literal – the objective truth – is inflexible and unassailable.
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New documentary collects theories about Kubrick's "The Shining"

I had never heard the one about Kubrik helping NASA fake the footage of the moon landing--now I have a craving to rewatch this
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documentary-with-theories-about-the-shining.html?_r=2&hp

Antiquity and newfangleness: Re-editing the Renaissance text in the digital age

Authored by Andrew Zurcher, Fellow and Director of Studies at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
http://oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/2012/01/10/antiquity-and-newfangleness-re-editing-the-renaissance-text-in-the-digital-age/

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One of the most exciting aspects of the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) project is that it, like Spenser’s Calender, gets to ask these questions
at a crisis moment in the history of reading and writing. Spenser produced his eclogues in the first century of print, at a time when this technology was
reaching a new height of bibliographical experimentation and complexity. He wanted his readers to ask themselves about the experience of reading, the authority
(even identity) of the author and of the text, the importance of layout, the materiality of the reading experience. These are questions that we, too, must
ask ourselves. In the year when the Kindle caught Fire, and in a freak historical recursiveness we all began to read and write (like Romans) on tablets,
we are all ourselves assisting in the invention of a new praxis of reading. Words on the page are now, in many uncomplicated contexts, simply words on
a screen. But what happens when we take the material complexity of a text like The Shepheardes Calender, or Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, or Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, and present it not as a book, but rather as a menu of options which the individual user controls? As we digitise Oxford University Press’s scholarly
editions, readying them for release on OSEO, we are not simply taking pictures of old books, and shoving them into cyberspace. We are trying to imagine
the future of reading. And we are trying to take care of works that, like The Shepheardes Calender, already seem to be self-conscious about, even resistant
to, the changes we are making to them.
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