Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘The Second Pass’

Apr 26

12 Comments

Depression, creativity and some more linkage

coming-soonI’ve not seen it yet, but the print edition of Saturday’s Age has an extract from my Griffith Review piece on depression and creativity. If it ever turns up online I’ll link to it, but in the meantime, just a reminder I’ve posted the complete, unedited version on this site, or you can download it as a pdf from the Griffith Review site. And please remember you can subscribe to Griffith Review by visiting their website, or purchase individual copies of Essentially Creative from Gleebooks, Readings or bricks and mortar bookshops everywhere.

Meanwhile, following on from Friday’s post about The Second Pass, I thought I’d link to another site I hadn’t seen until very recently, The Millions. A group blog with a very impressive list of regular and guest contributors, it offers intelligent – and substantial – commentary about books, arts and culture, and has recently offered a series of excellent articles about the future of book coverage.

That short piece about The Second Pass (and more particularly Genevieve, of Reeling and Writhing’s characteristically generous comment on it) reminded me that when I set this site up, one of my aims was to share links to articles and sites I thought were worth reading. That ambition rather fell by the wayside, largely because I found the tone of the site as it developed didn’t really suit a lot of linking and aggregation. I’m currently working on a major redesign which will allow me to aggregate links more effectively (a redesign which may also involve a name change, since I’ve rather taken against the name), but in the meantime, I though I’d offer a link to another site, and in particular a piece, I think everybody with an interest in the future of media should read, which is Clay Shirky’s ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’. It’s a month or so old now, but if you haven’t read it you should – it’s probably the most significant piece of writing the blogosphere has seen in the last twelve months.

And finally, my apologies if the content on the site has been a bit rackety recently. I’ve had a bit of a messy few weeks health and work-wise, so I’ve not really been on top of things (the WordPress system’s decision to eat my long post about the death of J.G. Ballard didn’t help either). But I’ve got good things planned for coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Break text

addthisTweet this

Apr 24

1 Comment

The Second Pass

435333026_9ef2d33964

Image by Richard Eriksson

A while back, I was musing about the future of the book review in an online world, and whether as the print forums for reviewing folded, we would see the rise of new, online forums. What I missed then was the launch of The Second Pass, a new and extremely impressive online book review which attempts to merge the best of the old with some of the new. As its editor, John Williams, explains in his Editor’s Note:

“There are many very good literary blogs out there (several of them can be found on our Links page). But most of these feature writing by one person (and perhaps an occasional guest), and, understandably, aren’t always updated daily, blogs being a full-time job for very few people. My occasional byline will be just one of many in the reviews sections: Circulating, which will review newly released titles; and The Backlist, which will focus on older, sometimes unfairly neglected books.

“The Blog will be updated several times every weekday. It will include, among other features, links to noteworthy reviews published elsewhere, great opening sentences, book covers both lovely and horrific, excerpts from books we admire, “anti-blurbs,” and roundups of what’s happening on other blogs.”

Meanwhile, for those of you after yet more writing about books, Critical Mass’ Rigoberto Gonzalez offers a list of eight blogs about books and writing he thinks are indispensable. Some, such as Maud Newton’s, are likely to be familiar, others, such as Ron Silliman’s, may be less so, but they’re all worth a look. And closer to home, Meanjin now has a blog.

Break text

addthistwitter-02