Caleb Crain, who posts on the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, copied and pasted the entire text of Moby Dick into Wordle.net. Wordle analyzes the frequency of words in a text, then arranges them to make a "word cloud." The more frequent the word, the bigger it appears. This is the result, comprising the 75 … Continue reading A World Without Ishmael

Moonrat, whose candor makes a pseudonym entirely necessary, writes my new favorite blog Editorial Ass. I started by reading her excellent post "How Important Is Your Book, or, Top Ten Ways to Blow a Book Deal #4", in which an author of some self-importance shoots himself in the foot over a nice lunch. Now I'm … Continue reading It’s Short for "Assistant"

A list on aol.com comprising one person's choice of the top ten books you should read before you die has whipped Miama Herald book blogger Connie Ogle into a mild frenzy. Her response, entitled "Stupidest. List. Ever.", is a nice salvo against middlebrow reading. Admittedly, that's a soft target, but you have to admire her … Continue reading What Do You Really Think?