The moral of this story is not that typing is superior to handwriting, that parents should have to transcribe the stories of their offspring or that private schools are superior to public ones. The moral of the story is that what we want from writing — what Simon wants and what the Sumerians wanted — is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. As Wolf writes: “A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think. This is the miraculous gift of the reading brain.” This is what Palmer wanted for his students — speed. This is what the typewriter promised Twain. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.
Culture & Society Articles | Miller-McCune Research Essay — Handwriting Is History | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

But typing in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.
Culture & Society Articles | Miller-McCune Research Essay — Handwriting Is History | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

What has changed is our sense of text as fixed, not fluid, as something solid to which we can return again and again. That’s the influence of the Web, of course, where story has no end and no beginning, and readers are not passive but play a determining role. This is scary to a certain way of thinking, but I want to look in the opposite direction, to suggest that what is more compelling is how this opens up the possibilities.
After a decade of fear, we’re connected to writing in new ways — latimes.com

There is no good, there is no bad, there’s just what happened. Dance with it.
Seth Godin’s Blog – Dancing with entropy (via stark)

Repubblica diffonde un fuorionda di Fini: “Berlusconi confonde la leadership con la monarchia, il consenso con l’immunità”. E lo scolo con la scarlattina.
Spinoza Â» Blog Archive Â» Purple haze

La notte prima, quando eravamo rimasti in pochi, Ernesto San Epifanio aveva detto che esisteva una letteratura eterosessuale, una letteratura omosessuale e una letteratura bisessuale. I romanzi, in genere, erano eterosessuali, la poesia invece era assolutamente omosessuale, i racconti, deduco, erano bisessuali, anche se questo non lo disse. Nell’immenso oceano della poesia distingueva varie correnti: finocchioni, finocchie, finocchietti, pazze, busoni, velate, ninfi e fileni. (da I detective selvaggi)
Roberto Bola̱o РWikiquote

* La lettura è piacere e gioia di essere vivo o tristezza di essere vivo e soprattutto è conoscenza e domande. La scrittura, invece, di solito è vuoto. Nelle viscere dell’uomo che scrive non c’è nulla. (da 2666, traduzione di Ilide Carmignani, Adelphi, Milano, 2008)
Roberto Bola̱o РWikiquote