links for 2007-12-22

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Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years'…
tags: Obama Now Experiencing Presidential Puberty, cultural observation, social commentary, news report, health care reform, parody, satire, humor, fucking hilarious, television, Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert, Ezra Klein, streaming video Stephen Colbert interviews Ezra Klein, who explains the…
tags: Hollywood writers' strike, cute internet animals, humor, politics, streaming video This is hilarious. All the cute animals on the internet are going on strike (by not being cute or adorable anymore) in support of the Hollywood writers' strike. From Colbert Report writers Frank Lesser and Rob…
Too long, thus under the fold - enjoy, think, bookmark for later, use: Netroots push back against MSM 'bias': Criticism from the left can take a variety of forms, including fact-checking, aggregating links and sometimes original reporting. Also, similar to the right's strategy over decades of "…

Did the person who posted this read through the first article, by any means? As a Literature student who loves poetry, I think it rings surprisingly true. The author could have been a bit more tactful, but in the end he'd be making the same point, and this is the best way to make it. Poetry is far more complex than prose. It's tiring, but the depth and richness make up for it. You feel like you've learned or experienced something. Popular fiction doesn't do that. It's a different universe altogether, really.

I read the first article, and while I am not without sympathy for people seeing a beloved genre wither away, in the end, the quoted comment boils down to "People who do not share my tastes in litereature are Bad People."

I don't deny that there's a huge difference between poetry and prose, but I don't think that the difference in reading and writing styles makes poetry any more inherently valuable than prose, or its loss more lamentable. And I find the claim that the lack of interest in poetry reflects a general coarsening of the reading public rather than, say, the failure of poets to write anything that people want to read to be faintly offensive.

But then, I don't read much poetry, so what do I know?

Poetry is like SF: the yawn-to-great stuff ratio is higher than in other kinds of literature and people dont read much nowadays. (But I guess similar kindo of argument can be made about lots of things, for example classical music).

Christopher Hitchems is a disgrace.