Nothing is more generally exploded than the folly of talking too much; yet I rarely remember to have seen five people together, where some one among them hath not been predominant in that kind, to the great constraint and disgust of all the rest. But among such as deal in multitudes of words, none are comparable to the sober, deliberate talker, who proceedeth with much thought and caution, maketh his preface, brancheth out into several digressions, findeth a hint that putteth him in mind of another story, which he promises to tell you when this is done, cometh back regularly to his subject, cannot readily call to mind some person’s name, holdeth his head, complaineth of his memory; the whole company all this while in suspense; at last says, it is no matter, and so goes on. And to crown the business, it perhaps proveth at last a story the company has heard fifty times before, or at best some insipid adventure of the relater.

There is a flattening effect: A circulating meme has the same weight of relevancy as a well-crafted essay. Once they are both outside the periphery of our attention span, we have a hard time carrying them with us. I have a hard time coming up with things I’ve read or seen on the Internet that have changed my life, but I can think of at least half a dozen books that have — perhaps because I’ve carried them in my hands.

Writers will no longer be writing for posterity, but will be competing for the nebulous spotlight of digital fame, which in these days comes in the form of viral status and features a cat. Their creativity will conform to fit the medium, which emphasizes speed over patience and quantity over quality. I’m afraid that literature will be like television, if novels are only available in online format: done solely for entertainment and written like it, too — relying heavily on cheap gimmicks to attract readers and ad space to sell art. I’m afraid that the digitization of literature will exasperate a culture that already pushes quick media consumption over lifelong enjoyment.

Ireland’s Central Bank said this morning that a commemorative coin intended to honour James Joyce, which misquotes Ulysses, was “an artistic representation of the author and text and not intended as a literal representation”.

The bank announced the launch of 10,000 copies of the collector coin yesterday. Featuring a portrait of the Ulysses author and lines from chapter three of the novel “depicted as a continuous stream of consciousness”, it reflects, said governor Patrick Honohan, “Joyce’s standing as one of the leading figures in the modernist movement”.

Unfortunately, the text quoted on the coin differs by one crucial “that” from the text written by Joyce.

At Stanford University, nine men and eight women with no formal music training listened to obscure classical music (four symphonies by late-baroque composer William Boyce) while lying inside fMRI machines. The researchers used a type of imaging that let them examine all different areas of the brain over the entire time that the participants were listening to the recording.

To ensure that the brain activity they were mapping was in response to the music as a whole, and not just to one of its structural features, the researchers also had the subjects listen to altered versions of the symphonies: in one, all rhythm and timing was removed, and in the other, they were made atonal.

During the nine and a half minutes that the subjects spent listening to the music in its unadulterated form, the researchers noted a “highly distinctive and distributed set of brain regions” that was synchronized between each them. In the music from which some of the elements that make it musical were removed, on the other hand, brain activity was markedly different from subject to subject.

The [Digital Public Library of America] represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism. The utopian tendency marked the Republic at its birth, for the United States was produced by a revolution, and revolutions release utopian energy—that is, the conviction that the way things are is not the way they have to be. When things fall apart, violently and by collective action, they create the possibility of putting them back together in a new manner, according to higher principles.

[…]

For all its futuristic technology, the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century. What could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans? What could be more pragmatic than the designing of a system to link up millions of megabytes and deliver them to readers in the form of easily accessible texts?

Above all, the DPLA expresses an Enlightenment faith in the power of communication. Jefferson and Franklin—the champion of the Library of Congress and the printer turned philosopher-statesman—shared a profound belief that the health of the Republic depended on the free flow of ideas.