Handwriting is dying because its laggardly pace impedes thinking, according to an essay by professor Anne Trubek, who includes a brief history of handwriting and the teaching of penmanship alongside her argument.

When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable.

[...]

Whatever we use to write, there will be a shortfall between conception and execution, between the ideas in our heads and the words we produce. We often insert nostalgia into this gap.

Robin Sloan says the future of media — media that successfully captures both attention and money — may be in events, especially events that act as generative occasions for original creative work.

A specter is haunting the internet, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of getting people to pay money. It’s the challenge of get ting them to pay attention. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, better, because we as internet users and blog readers and tweet slingers will have more cool, weird, interesting stuff to look at all the time, and it will just keep coming faster and getting cooler and fragments and—ack!

Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on changing our approach to creativity is just exquisite. She argues that it may be healthier and more practical to adopt a Greco-Roman view of creativity, where inspiration comes from capricious external forces, than to continue with the humanist idea of the suffering artist who’s solely responsible for the success or failure of his creations. There’s a section on poet Ruth Stone’s writing process around 10:15.

John C. Abell, bureau chief for Wired.com, runs down the scammy subscription practices of print magazines.

I made the mistake of picking up a magazine in Barnes & Noble over the weekend, showering both my feet and the floor in subscription cards. Do people actually mail those silly things in?

At The Guardian, David Parkinson recommends the best 10 foreign, non-Hollywood films of 2009.

I promise to take it easy with the best-of lists over the holiday. The last thing the Internet needs is another set of bullet points.

Laura Miner muses on the evolution of the magazine and the development of Pictory, her excellent new site for multi-author photo essays.

It’s interesting to think about Pictory in the context of a magazine, because, while some people will call it an online magazine, in reality it is something else entirely — something new that we don’t have a word for yet. Innovative sites that bill themselves as online lit journals have the same problem. They’re not journals at all — and the use of old labels muddies our thinking.

Marco Arment, maker of Instapaper, asks and answers what would happen if copyright were perfectly enforceable 100 percent of the time:

Today’s demand for permissively licensed content is nearly zero because most people can get away with small-scale infringement. If that were no longer possible, all of these infringements would be replaced by much more demand for permissively licensed content. Any publishers unwilling to satisfy the demand would be left in the dust by those who would.

Lately I’ve been looking for poems of charity and gratitude — maybe because I feel so little of either this time of year. This recording of “Sweet Charity” by John Clellon Holmes is my favorite so far. (Holmes’s books of poetry are sadly out of print, though a few of his novels remain.) The poem was read by Donald S. Hays last year at the anniversary celebration for the Arkansas MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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Nick Bilton responds to plans by major publishers to delay ebook releases in order to boost hard cover sales:

I can tell you one thing: When I’m looking for a new book on my Kindle and told I have to wait four months for the e-book version, I won’t be heading to the bookstore. Instead, I’ll click the back button and buy one of the 360,000 other e-books available now.

Didn’t anyone at these publishing companies watch what happened to the music and newspaper industries over the last 10 years?

Also, a best-selling business writer has taken ebook rights away from his print publisher in an exclusive arrangement with Amazon.

I’ve got a new poem up at 42opus this week. Thanks to Brian Leary et al for the beautiful presentation.

Okay, so maybe my day hasn’t been so bad in the grand scheme of things. The story of a 43-hour surgery to remove a 15-pound tumor.

John Oakes, founder of OR books, explains how his company eliminates the middlemen in publishing by combining print-on-demand with direct sales through the company’s web site.

Imagine taking the guesswork out of publishing. Imagine a publisher printing only to fulfill orders, and with a minimum of waste; imagine further a system that sidesteps warehouses, wholesalers, and even–at least at the outset of a book's life–bookstores and online retailers. This would be a process wherein the publisher focuses on developing ideas into workable manuscripts, carefully editing them–and, above all, devoting substantial resources to marketing the finished product.

Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T.

Ommwriter is a wonderfully fussy new full-screen word processor for the Mac. There are other full-screen editors, WriteRoom being my favorite, but Ommwriter is the first effort I’ve seen to create an entire environment for creative composition through the use of ambient music, customizable feedback sounds, and an attractive background image.

Ingenious really, and the kind of software the could only be written for the Mac. The free beta is well worth a download.

(via Daring Fireball).

I am interviewed at PANK by the lovely Roxane Gay, on subjects such as editing, innovation in online journals, and zombies. There’s a fair bit about our selection process here at Linebreak, for those of you interested in how the sausage is made.

Sarah Moore’s poem from last week kicked off an interesting discussion on enjambments and end stops over at Snarkmarket.

Some very interesting-looking books on James Mustich’s best of 2009 list, including Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, which I’m told has some charming meditations on poets and poetry. Amazon does Saturday delivery now, you know. And really, why buy presents for other people when you can buy books for yourself?

It’s been a long week here, kids.

Sherman Alexie is no fan of the Kindle, or of ebooks in general, as he explains in his appearance on The Colbert Report. (Via Writerly Haphazardly).

Loneliness is contagious, according to a recent study described in The Washington Post.

The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate.

I’m collecting examples of good broadside design for some future projects. These are some of my favorites so far.

Further recommendations are welcome in the comments.

In The X-Ray of the Sarcophagus of Ta-Pero
Oneiros Press
Designed by Shawn Sheehy.

The Madness of Kong
Ithaca Typothetae

Painful Alphabet
Colored Horse Studios

I Didn’t Sleep
Printed by Shari DeGraw
City Lights Books

Search Party
Cannibal Books
Designed by Katy Henrichsen
Printed by Effing Press