aw. Re: Where did ...

[alice wellintown]

A warning to younger readers, frequent coarse language does occur.

It does? I'm interested. Is this a warning or a marketing scheme?

If you, Paul, read this nove on your new Kindle Firel, you could toss
a wrench into the data. lol ;---*

http://www.yareads.com/feed-%E2%80%93-m-t-anderson/book-reviews/2182



On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 5:13 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> On 9/29/2011 2:06 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> The dots on the page or what rhetorical analysis calls artful diction
>> or tropes are arranged in paterns or what rhetorical analysis calls
>> artful syntax or schemes. This is analysis 101. You don't need a
>> Standford computer to count the words or identify patterns when a
>> text, the kind Nabokov calls a minor author text is studied. The dots
>> and the patterns are generic and it takes an experienced writer or
>> reader of such texts only a quick skim to calssify it or put it in a
>> genre (Aristotle to Chicago School see Booth). But when the text, say
>> a Jackson Pollack Painting, is the work of genius, the Stanford
>> computer is, while usefull still, limited by its use of the
>> translation of words to numbers. This point, as we discussed
>> previously when we dismissed McLuhan's folk/literate binanry, and the
>> surmises of Gleick on computers that use words or "languages",
>> although favoring the deeper stories of Pinker, is an ancient one that
>> Plato and Arsitotle plumbed. That it has surfaced as a preoccupation
>> of the academy should not surprise, as we are in the middle of a
>> communications crisis or revolution that the Greeks would both
>> recognize and find monsterous. Humanism, the David with a stone, now
>> only rolls it to the top of Camus's mountain top, where it finds
>> nothing, and can not smile about it. Or maybe it's just gas.
>>
> I'd love to see the analysis of cultural transmission and the social life of
> novels that Amazon could come up with their fantastical algorithms the
> zillions of gigabytes of data they have collected on us readers.
>
> I just ordered a Kindle Fire, with the full knowledge that every future move
> I make will be subjected to distribution analysis.
>
> Mr. Finn may well be on the right track. if you're going to have to go
> through 1000 badly written book reviews you need to employ distant reading
> rather than the close variety.  From the little bit of the study I glanced
> through he's a good writer, which I hope doesn't jeopardize his academic
> career too severely.
>
> Notice he utilizes Bourdieu. Several works referred to.
>
> P.
>
>