When we began to commission articles for this issue we were interested less in what might be called old nature writing — by which I mean the lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer — than in writers who approached their subject in heterodox and experimental ways. We also wanted the contributions to be voice-driven, narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the story, if sometimes only bashfully. The best new nature writing is also an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue. If travel writing can often seem like a debased and exhausted genre, nature writing is its opposite: something urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our times.

@ Granta

I don’t know anything about Bill Teitelbaum except that I’m always glad to come across one of his stories

Across the street is building a fence and cut down some tall bushes between his house and the next, home to an ‘independent pharmaceuticals distributor’ who reappeared a few weeks ago — and got right back to business — after two years’ mysterious absence following a bloody fight on the sidewalk and police raid. In his line of work, I suppose he might have a green thumb, but who knew he was keen on landscaping until he stood on the neighbor’s lawn last night and yelled, “You’ve ruined my yard’s whole fucking ambience.”

Aesthetics and low-brow associations might not be the main cause of the fear of gaming, however. Many professors can get beyond the “pop culture” aspect of gaming—indeed, many will embrace it in accordance with a cultural studies populism. More profound are the cognitive barriers to gaming compared to other new media genres. To use Janet Murray’s language, gaming as a genre provides a specific form of “cognitive scaffolding.“1 Unlike the essentially discursive nature of new media forms like podcasting and blogging, the typical immersive video-based game’s scaffolding appears difficult to integrate into the ecology of teaching as currently understood by a wide variety of faculty.

@ Educause Quarterly
(via Liberal Education Today)

He repeatedly dreams they drive their car off a cliff and fall headfirst, he and his young son, into the ocean. And yet each time, each dream, they somehow manage to survive unharmed. They never drown. In each dream the details are as specific and vivid as the one before. And the dream always begins the same: he is driving on a deserted highway at an increasingly fast speed with his son sitting beside him.

~ Brandon Hobson @ Titular

The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

It’s 15 degrees and I’m wearing my long-dead auntie’s mink. On the train ride to work the conductor forgets to punch my ticket. I must look to have boarded at a wealthier, outlying suburb.

~ Louisa Wolf @ Pequin