Includes bibliographical references (pages [185]-188).
Contents:
G♯-Minor Seventh in the Second Inversion -- Titled: The Title -- Brooding -- Hermes Goes to College -- Hat Trick -- Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History -- A Bread Crumb Essay: Best American Essays 2005 -- Saving the Daylights Out of Saving Daylight -- Time in a Vacuum Bottle: A Genealogy -- Thermostat -- The Zoo We Thought We Bought Bought Us: How the Shape of Shape Shapes Us -- Some Space -- Asymmetry -- More or Less: The Camouflage Schemes of the Fictive Essay -- Dear Miss Hamilton, -- I Kill My Grandma Once and for All -- What Was on My Mind: Face to Facebook with My Mother's Death, July 2012 -- What Was on My Mind: Face to Facebook with My Father's Death, March/April 2014 -- Against the Beloved -- Finger Exercises: Tuscaloosa, April 27, 2011 -- Postcards from Below the Bug Line -- I-65 -- The Bypass -- Old Pond: A Lesson Plan in Tweets -- WW/MM.
Summary:
"This book is a collection of 30 essays, meditative and formally inventive, that consider all kinds of subjects (keys, hats, Bell's Palsy), the memoir, writing, the essay itself, and Michael Martone's friendship with writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. The theme of the book is the emergence and incorporation of new technologies that the essay can try. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues while the pieces on the death of Martone's mother, father, and brother-in-law were written on Facebook while the events happened. An essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written in "tweets." Brooding--the book's title and the title of an essay--is about the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after 17 years, of a brood of cicada and the reconnection to people in the past and metaphors of electronic memory. Other essays treat that memory and remembering via the memoir as technologies, essays calculating and sorting machines"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.