Ted Underwood

I had the privilege of meeting Richard Siken when I was quite young–an undergraduate at the University of Arizona–and he gave me lots of good advice on the poetry world (and life), conversations I still cherish. Please help him out.

Stroke Recovery Fund for Poet Richard Siken.

Nuclear and Environmental

Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse Is (Still) Disappointing.”

James Livingston, “Time, Dread, Apocalypse Now.

Ted Nordhaus, “The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse.”

Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin, eds., Apocalypse, special issue of ASAP/Journal.

Frame, Apocalypse.

Brad Plumer, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace.”

Damian Carrington, “Why The Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.”

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Ted Underwood, a professor of 18th and 19th century literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has an interesting post on text mining and what is being called “distant reading,” “We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History.” His blog is The Stone and the Shell: Historical Questions Raised by a Quantitative Approach to Language.

Some notes on the storm hitting the Northeast.

And io9‘s George Dvorsky reports on Lee Smolin’s theory of Cosmological Natural Selection, the idea that: “gives a kind of raison d’etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible.”

The Hyperarchival Parallax

Bradley J. Fest

Data Mining the Literary Hyperarchive and Some Other Links