Browsing the blog archives for September, 2007

Agented

28 Sep, 2007 in Pop Apocalypse, agent, postirony by Lee

In another deviation from academic matters–but not entirely–I’m now agented, and well-agented.
The interesting academic angle on this development comes from a conversation I had yesterday with Matt Jockers, a professor in the English department who does technology-related stuff. We talked about the possibility of building or developing some sort of social-networking application that I [...]

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Pop Apocalypse

21 Sep, 2007 in Pop Apocalypse, fiction by Lee

In the wake of the acceptance of my first novel Pop Apocalypse by a publisher, I’ve spent the last few weeks scrambling to find a literary agent. I’m learning a lot about the book publishing business in short order–ironically, more than I have ever learned in any of my academic literature classes–but am reticent [...]

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Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?

20 Sep, 2007 in Jonathan Safran Foer, Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face, postirony by Lee

This is a question I have been sleeping on, fitfully. I finished The Emperor’s Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can’t. First, let’s get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the [...]

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Enter the Snark

19 Sep, 2007 in Dave Eggers, The Believer, Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face, believer, postirony by Lee

What should the critic of postironic fiction (i.e., me) make of this American Scholar article by Melvin Jules Bukiet?
You can see it from Manhattan if you look carefully across the East River. You can even go there if you follow a young couple (he’s got a goatee and she has a ponytail) onto [...]

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Spooky

10 Sep, 2007 in Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, William Gibson, Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face, postirony by Lee

I finished reading William Gibson’s newest novel, Spook Country, a few days ago and have been trying to figure out how I feel about it. It is one of the few books I have eagerly scooped up in hardcover, I loved his Pattern Recognition so much. The promise of another book set in [...]

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Much Nigher Than You Think

4 Sep, 2007 in Pop Apocalypse, fiction by Lee

You know that hypothetical situation I mentioned in my previous post, the one about my having at some point in the near future to think about what to do with this blog if I got Pop Apocalypse picked up by a publisher? Well, holy shit, it’s not a hypothetical situation anymore. I repeat, [...]

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The End (of the Summer) is Nigh

4 Sep, 2007 in Pop Apocalypse, Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face, academic, fiction, postirony by Lee

I’m back in San Francisco–blogging from the Que Tal cafe on Guerrero and 22nd. My long summer of traveling is finally at an end.
This has been perhaps my craziest and busiest summer on record. I spent two weeks in Singapore, two weeks in Jakarta, more than three weeks at the Ransom Center at [...]

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