Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

Whoops, I missed last week’s weekend reading post. By the time I realized it, the weekend was pretty much over. Therefore, here is two weeks worth of things for you to check out:

• Jane over at Game Girl Advance isn’t all that impressed with the new Playstation 3. I’ve, more or less, lost track of video games (modern ones at least) the past few years…I am still catching up to most PS2 games besides Grand Theft Auto!

• Derik over at MadInkBeard reviews the new graphic novel based on the 9-11 commission.

• Watching this time attacker blow through Castlevania is depressing. The original Castlevania has always given me a lot of trouble.

• One of my favorite Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan fiction series from a few years ago was Mining For Gold.

• Project Gutenberg is archiving nearly one hundred year old issues of The Atlantic Monthly. Here is an issue from 1887.

• You can read about Portuguese author Jose Saramago in this essay over at The Modern Word.

• Via ReadySteadyBook here is an article about the new Fagles translation of Aeneid.

• Conversational Reading reports that the new Jean-Philippe Toussaint book, about French soccer star Zidane, is only seventeen pages long.

• Also from Conversational Reading is a new review of Italo Calvino’s T-Zero.

I just finished reading Italo Calvino’s Hermit In Paris.

Today I was looking through Nick Monfort’s excellent essay Continuous Paper: Print Interfaces and Early Computer Writing today and noticed something very interesting-

invited by IBM to write a story using a computer in 1973. Calvino had the protagonist of “The Burning of the Abominable House,” the story which resulted, use punch cards to feed data into the computer. But according to Calvino’s wife, the limited computer access in Paris, where they were living at the time, meant that Calvino worked by “carrying out all the operations the computer was supposed to do himself.”[16] Paper seems to have been the whole mechanism, not just the interface, for his foray into computing.

I never knew about this! I haven’t had the opportunity to read Calvino’s short stories before, but I’ll have to pick this one up soon.

Last week I reread Gore Vidal’s excellent obituary of Italo Calvino. I’d read this a few years ago but I recently came across it again and enjoyed rereading it. I’m not super familiar with Vidal’s works, but I’d like to get more acquainted with them.

Fantastic Metropolis has a good introduction to the works of Italo Calvino on its site.

Read in 2005: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

Italo Calvino’s widow has gone to court in rome to try to stop the publication of extracts from Calvino’s correspondence with a lover during the 1950′s.