Litopia After Dark: Long Tails - And How To Use Them
Sunday, November 30th, 2008Welcome to our podcast! Looks like this is your first time here - you may want to subscribe to ourRSS feed - it'll keep you up to date with our latest shows. Thanks for dropping by - and don't be a stranger!
With thanks to iosonadry on Flickr for the tail photo
Winter has well and truly arrived. If you’ve forgotten what daylight looks like, ice is forming on your keyboard and your fingers feel as though rigor mortis has set in, then let Litopia After Dark thaw you out with the warmth of our convivial banter and the fever of heated debate. This week we’re discussing the death of irony, writing in colour, sound-bite culture, cosy village pubs and sex addiction… red hot topics to fire up your synapses and set light to your brain cells.
In a piece in the New York Times this week, Andy Newman reports that eminent novelist Joan Didion has declared that irony is dead. Research appears to confirm this. A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words “irony,” “ironic” and “ironically” in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year. We ask whether Didion is right, are the days of irony over?
There’s no disputing the fact that the internet is a huge research boon for writers, yet in this week’s Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow suggests that far from widening our horizons, the net may actually be making the average writer rather myopic in their research. How far will the internet take us with our search for answers, and is it far enough?
Harvard magazine this month looks at how animals acquire the language of colour and use it. With nature ablaze with colour, we’re wondering just how colourful – literally – writers really are. It’s a bit like asking – so you dream in colour? And how important is the language of colour?
In FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, John McWhorter reviews a new book by Elvin T. Lim, entitled The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. The problem is real, says McWhorter. Analyzing all the presidential inaugural addresses, for example, Lim shows that the average sentence length has become ever shorter and the level of vocabulary ever lower. So, is oratory dead? Can we expect better oratory from Obama than Bush?
Bloomsbury are reissuing the collected drinking books of that old soak, Kingsley Amis. On Drink, is a witty, belligerent and often profound defence of the kind of drinking habits that Kingsley acquired in the Old England of mixed drinks and beer. In it, Amis laments the destruction wrought on the English pub, writes Roger Scruton in The Observer. Is the English pub really dead?
The days of the misery memoir may be limited, but rapidly rising up to replace it is the first-person account of the author’s sex addiction. In recent months, we’ve had Susan Cheever’s Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie, Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, and a few higher-class affairs such as Giulia Sissa’s Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World and Ian Kelly’s Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy. What is with all these sex addiction memoirs? Who is reading them… and why???
On the panel this week we’ve kept it small and intimate to create maximum warmth. There’s scorching Donna Ballman, blistering Dave Bartram and inflamed Eve Harvey (
) and the Ustream chatroom (8pm GMT) was on fire this week, join us next Friday in the smouldering ruins.
Links mentioned in the show…
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