Paradise Tossed

By John Robert Ladd

Anyone who’s on Twitter, which at this point is almost everyone, has at least a tacit understanding of what hashtags are: search terms denoted with a # mark that make finding tweets on similar topics easy. Here at PT, we commonly use and follow the #poetry and #tech hashtags, for obvious reasons. And if you know my podcast cohost Cameron at all, you know he is the master of ridiculously long, often nonsensical hashtags.

But beyond just denoting the topic of a tweet, hashtags are often used to organize Twitter-based games. These games usually begin with some sort of writing prompt, and then a steady stream of tweets come in that respond to that prompt in some way. Twitter being a fairly literary platform to begin with, oftentimes these games revolve around poetry- or book-related topics. Here are a few that we enjoy:

tagged

haiku,

poetry,

social networking,

twitter in

Tuesday

Apr272010

The Social Web, Post-postmodern Thinking, and How Literary Criticism Can Be Good for Community

27 April 2010 at 8:27 EDT |

Image courtesy Randall Munroe of xkcd.By Travis King

We are now almost a decade into the twenty-first century, and the Internet has come into its own. With this evolution comes a new paradigm. The postmodern world of cynicism, despair, and disconnection that developed in the twentieth century is changing in many ways, including the ways we form social connections and the ways we express ourselves in literature. There is a movement afoot within this new paradigm, a post-postmodern movement. It’s in its early stages, and there are a number of ways it could progress. Referred to variously as post-postmodernism, reconstructivism, or New Sincerity, this incipient movement draws upon postmodern theories of the past, such as deconstruction, but instills in them new life. Wikipedia offers a more extensive introduction to the subject and can serve as a good starting point for further research. I would like to focus on two aspects encountered that strike me as particularly appealing.

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technology in

Thursday

Apr012010

'A Real Inspiration to Continue Writing': On Blogging and Technology for Writers

01 April 2010 at 6:6 EDT |

As part of our ongoing guest series, we'd like to welcome blogger and essayist Lethe Bashar. Lethe is the founding editor of Escape Into Life, the online arts journal, and his own essays appear on The Blog of Innocence. He is also a prolific Twitter user, and you can find one of his many accounts here.

Every writer will approach blogging differently. For some writers, a blog is mainly a marketing apparatus to promote their published (or unpublished) books. Others treat a blog more like a daily journal, in which they record their development as a writer. And still others will transform their blog into a creative vehicle, often based on a theme or an idea, with lots of experimentation along the way. None of these are better or worse than the other, and there are quite a few I've left out, such as the collaborative blog, which is a kind of publishing outlet for a group of writers.

If I'd been born ten years earlier, I imagine I'd be submitting work to literary journals, and attempting to wedge myself into the cut-throat publishing industry. But the precise timing of my development as a writer coincided with the technology boom for online publishing. It was at this moment that I decided to eschew sending my work to journals and agents (as the publishing world was on its way down anyways), and throw myself into this new territory and see what would come of it.

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writing in

Guests

Thursday

Mar252010

One Thousand Cranes: A Poem, Some Paper, and the Power of People

25 March 2010 at 7:53 EDT |

My green and blue crane just happens to match this site.by John Robert Ladd

My Twitter friend Michele Ebel folds paper cranes. In late February, we got into a conversation about her ambition to fold a thousand of them, according to an ancient Japanese tradition. The customary practice is to tie all of the cranes together with string, and to give them as a gift.

But Michele's vision is much larger than a single wish or a single person. She's realized that a thousand cranes can touch a thousand people or more, and the string that ties the cranes together doesn't have to be physical. In this case, the string is the web.

tagged

friendship,

poetry,

social networking,

twitter in

Friday

Mar192010

'Raiding Eternity' Deals with Issues of Remembrance and Mortality

19 March 2010 at 6:24 EDT |

By John Robert Ladd

We don't often simply post a link on this blog, usually reserving an action like that for Twitter or Facebook. However, every once and a while there's an article so good that it deserves its own blog post.

Raiding Eternity, by Joel Johnson of Gizmodo, is one such article. Described by Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing as an 'experimental prose piece,' this brief amalgamation of essay and short story succinctly captures a key idea about the Internet: that the information we disseminate now will be around long after we are gone.

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prose,

reading,

recommendation,

social networking in