Torah Ball

_{Richard Grossman, Torah Ball, 2011. Corundum sphere 5″ in diameter inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten Commandments currently buried inside Mount Princeton, Colorado, USA.}

Given my ongoing interest in megatexts and other emerging hybrid and transmedia forms, I am organizing a second panel on emergent literary forms of the twenty-first-century for the 2023 Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, California (the first was at the 2021 MLA Convention). Please consider submitting an abstract to festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu by March 24, 2022. Here’s the CFP:

Twenty-First-Century Forms

If the novel and lyric poem might be considered residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in the twenty-first century? Panel on emergent literary forms: transmedia, digital, hybrid, remediated, megatexts, other. 250-word abstract, brief bio.

Science

The first evidence for cosmic inflation–i.e., the Big Bang–was discovered this week.

Megan Garber at The Atlantic, “What It’s Like to be Right About the Big Bang?”

The search for Flight MH370 is revealing one thing: the ocean is filled with garbage.

Kim Stanley Robinson alert: Paul Rosenfeld, “Would You Take a One-Way Ticket to Mars?”

And as part of his forthcoming 3 million page novel, Breeze Avenue (2015), Richard Grossman has buried a crystal ball deep inside of Princeton Mountain in Colorado. The ball, “made of synthetic sapphire, which is almost as indestructible as diamond,” has the Ten Commandments inscribed on it in Hebrew, and in “20 million years, as a result of natural forces carefully calculated by the geologists, the Torah Ball will emerge from its eroded resting place and bear the Ten Commandments down the mountain.” Hyperarchivalists of the deep future rejoice!