Summer—Uh, Fall Reading

Fall Reading, 2012

• The Copper Scroll, Joe Donahue
• The Network, Jenna Osman
• Regular Expressions Cookbook, Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan
• Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis
• The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly
• The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
• Ruby Best Practices, Gregory T. Brown
• Design Patterns in Ruby, Russ Olsen
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma et al.
• The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
• The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, Brant Cooper et al.
• The Modern Poetic Sequence, M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall
• Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, Susan Grimm
• Introduction to Algorithms, Thomas Cormen et al.
• Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Gary Blank
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter

Suggestions welcome!

The Perks of Being an English Major

Twitterature

After downloading TweetDeck for my computer, I'm officially addicted to Twitter. I imagine if I ever get a smart (read: modern) phone that has things like—oh, I don't know, the Internet—it'll get even worse.

I don't necessarily think that Twitter has revolutionized or will revolutionize social media, grassroots organization, or literature in general, but I do think that it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for the written word, particularly poetry. While I've so far only really used it to tweet links to electronic versions of my poems on the Internet, I'd like to eventually use it to incorporate media from Facebook and YouTube, tweet poems directly, or participate in on-line poetry events.

For example: tonight I'll be taking part in 32poems' poet party on Twitter (you can follow via the #poetparty hashtag). There'll be a Q&A segment going on for about an hour, and I'm actually really looking forward to being asked questions about poetry, communicating/commiserating with other poets, and (somewhat selfishly) earning a measure of exposure and getting the opportunity to network with poets, literary magazine editors, and independent booksellers.

I really like the immediacy of Twitter: the ability to reach writers all over the globe, the "timely updates," and the more-or-less real-time conversations. It's sort of like sending and receiving text messages to the whole world at times, but ultimately I think the access to a greater literary community it permits is definitely worth it.

So, if you have time tonight: #poetparty, Twitter, 9:00 pm est!