Disappearing Writer
This morning I read an AI-generated review of my own writing. It was of an academic article[1] from 2010, about the photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). The notification and link came from academia.edu, a...
Category: print
Tired Clichés and Fine Familiar Phrases
A few weeks ago LinkedIn invited me to contribute to some teaching materials for writers. The subject was avoiding clichés. As usual, I found myself objecting: it’s true that a badly-placed cliché can stop...
Games and Play
On New Year’s Eve, the postman delivered a copy of a new book from Bloomsbury, Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. It contains my essay, “Games and Play: Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images”. ...
Democracy and a Prophecy
H.L.Mencken, “the sage of Baltimore,” wrote this sobering prophecy almost exactly a century ago. I found it recently posted on Facebook by a former friend (former by his decision, not mine). As democracy is...
Publishing Now
As long as I can remember, I’ve thought print was magic. At first, I believed it literally — magic as a way of making things happen that otherwise would not not happen. I remember...