In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like "Hell on Wheels," Sons of Anarchy," "Dexter," and "Breaking Bad" as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring "characters the audience likes and wants to see succeed, even though they act an awful lot like villains.
I love this moment in China Miéville's The City & the City: The narrator (for this is an I-book), Inspector Tyador Borlu, is a noir cop in a fictional Balkan capital, Corwi is his assistant, and in their language aj Tyrko means Turkish-style.
How can you use the market place to predict future classics? How could you even bet on the literary future? EBay has found a way -- a really interesting one. The futures markets tell us that Darren Shan (author of the young adult series Cirque du Freak) is more than twice as valuable as of today than New Yorker darling David Mitchell. But Ken Follett is a cut above that.How do I know?
Tomorrow I leave for RMMLA, which should be a blast. My new friend philosopher Peter Gratton will be there. I'm going to do a panel with object-oriented philosophers Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant. Ian and Levi have books that are imminent and marvelously complementary, both on OOO.
I've recenly had a lot of success workshopping an essay by blogging about it. It's on Buddhism and object-oriented ontology and you can find the most recent post here.