Jeeves is officially being retired from Ask Jeeves, presumably because paying out a licensing fee to the estate of P.G. Wodehouse was too much of a prohibitive cost. The new site is utterly bland without the literary butler.
Betsy Retallack has found an unusual poetic inspiration: her husband’s obsession with junky cars. The success of her first poetry collection has inspired a second book, Whither the Axle My Sweet Love Gutted for Me from the Yard?
Expect Ask.com to hit the search engine junk heap within two years. Heaven forbid they should continue spending money on the one thing that made them distinctive–and how onerous could the Wodehouse estate’s terms been anyway?
Ed, I have to respectfully dissent regarding Vollmann. Now, I love Vollmann as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy isn’t you), but every once in a while somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say “yeah, we know you’re amazing, but you gotta do some rewrites, and cut some of it too”. Or else it’s just going to get worse and worse.
I tried to read Europe Central — I wasn’t having trouble parsing the sentences, but I was having trouble justifying why I’m going to spend like 80 hours of my life reading it all. Know what I mean?
I read UNCENTERING THE EARTH — it’s Vollmann’s most accessible work. It’s a pretty straight exploration of Copernicus’ work. At 240-something pages of text, plus notes, etc., it flies by. It was fun and I learned a couple of things.
Expect Ask.com to hit the search engine junk heap within two years. Heaven forbid they should continue spending money on the one thing that made them distinctive–and how onerous could the Wodehouse estate’s terms been anyway?
Ed, I have to respectfully dissent regarding Vollmann. Now, I love Vollmann as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy isn’t you), but every once in a while somebody has got to tap him on the shoulder and say “yeah, we know you’re amazing, but you gotta do some rewrites, and cut some of it too”. Or else it’s just going to get worse and worse.
I tried to read Europe Central — I wasn’t having trouble parsing the sentences, but I was having trouble justifying why I’m going to spend like 80 hours of my life reading it all. Know what I mean?
What exactly do they have going for them, other than Jeeves?
I read UNCENTERING THE EARTH — it’s Vollmann’s most accessible work. It’s a pretty straight exploration of Copernicus’ work. At 240-something pages of text, plus notes, etc., it flies by. It was fun and I learned a couple of things.