Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In this review of How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University, Christopher Findeisen analyzes Jeffrey J. Williams’s assessment of higher education in the United States. Linking the decline of funding for universities and colleges, rising student debt, the exploitation of academic labor, and the digital humanities, the review examines the omission of accounts of “the not-so-remarkable everyperson academic, the untenured, the up-and-comers, and the downtrodden.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/properly)
The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project experiments with microfiction, or flash fiction, a genre of literature that generally entails narratives of only 300-1000 words. Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s pithy “The Scarlatti Tilt”, a story of only 34 words published in 1971, my work involves 24 stories of 140 characters or less about life in an American city in the 21st C. delivered––or “tweeted”––on Twitter over a 24 hr. period.
The launch date was Friday, August 21, beginning 12 a.m. PST. Each hour until 11 p.m., I posted a story, and followers of my twitter site were encouraged to tweet their own. After followers tweeted their stories, I cut and pasted them to the Project Blog. An archive of all of the stories can be found there.
As a participatory work, the project was a success: Over 85 stories were submitted by 25+ participants from five countries. As a social experiment, it showed that Twitter can facilitate the making of art in a collaborative way: For a whole day we turned Twitter into a Literary Salon that brought together strangers and friends from far-flung places to share their work and love of literature, thus extending the normally perceived use of Twitter.
(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI)
Attempting Ziggurats 4 is an installation based on a story by John Barth entitled "Glossolalia," which is made up of a set of oblique and somewhat desperate words that have a familiar ring to them. As each section of the spoken text of the story unfolds, underlying sounds of social activities are gradually folded into its rhythm.
The various versions of Attempting Ziggurats find their basis in the story of the Tower of Babel and its ongoing reverberations in American culture. The pivotal moment of the story, the instant that language becomes noise, is one that is forever enshrined in American society through its incorporation of cultural difference as a central component of the concept and fabric of the nation. Here, that babble of noise repeatedly coalesces into the rhythms of the Lord's Prayer, a text which, prior to 1962, was recited daily in United States public school classrooms.
(Source: Artist's description, ELO_AI)
