Improv

I’m reading a little book by James Elkins called What Happened to Art Criticism? It’s orienting me in a world almost totally unfamiliar to me, though it’d be even more helpful if its references were hyperlinked. A Globe and Mail review (Google cache) of the publisher behind Elkins’ book—Prickly Paradigm Press—notes the existence of blogs as comparable with the series, and the Creative Commons folks, and Cory Doctorow’s and Larry Lessig’s early examples, give me hope for a convergence phenomenon, where stuff of limited appeal can widen its appeal by being freely available in an ephemeral, less-produced format, such as MP3 or phosphor dots or LED, but also available in permanent, library-friendly, printed pages between tough covers.