Learning and Discovering: From Paper onto the Web

I love wandering through the Web. And I have a pretty standard routine reading every day the mainstream press online. It’s basically four titles: El Nuevo Día (elnuevodia.com), Puerto Rico’s main newspaper; La Repubblica (repubblica.it), Italy’s most important (together with Il Corriere della Sera); Spain’s El País (elpais.com, fabulous for its TV Series and Cinema coverage and maths & science); The NYT (nytimes.com, of which I read everything from recipes to films to book reviews); and The Guardian (theguardian.com). So, every week I have completed a pretty indulgent reading of all of them. [There are the RSS feeds too, through the friendly Feedly, and that’s another story.]

But I also love reading paper newspapers and stuff. When in Italy I indulge every Saturday with three fantastic complements to main papers: Robinson with La Repubblica, La Lettura with Corriere della Sera, and Tutto Libri with La Stampa. The former two have Twitter and Instagram accounts, and all have a wonderful paper version (online version comes at a cost and Robinson’s is not the same as the printed one). I love both, and I spend interminable time reading them. I brought with me a couple of issues of each, so this new year’s beginnings has seen a few discoveries started from paper. Which then go to the Web, and sometimes finish up again on paper or some other stuff. The fact is, I have often bits of information I conserve, archive or annotate that stem from the analogue world. This seems also a nice way to discuss and share them.

What Have I Learned So Far? Here come the annotations. Most of all regarding the figurative arts, which is fine, given in one week I’ll begin my stellar New Media course!

Volto di donna (1900). Ritratto di Paolina Biondi
Image: Public Domain
  • The short story The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson is a classic of American Literature. A sort of horror tale it tells a story about a weird lottery, whereby every resident of a village plays and only one gets awarded. But there’s more… When originally published, on the New Yorker in 1948, it received a record number of protest letters. Read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery?verso=true
  • Then, there is Tanino Liberatore, a cartoonist, illustrator and mad genius. This is what Guillermo del Toro thinks:

Fact is, I have never read his comics. But I appreciate his dark, hard boiled style.

This guy is RanXerox

Last, and certainly not least, Hyperallergic reports that it’s Public Domain time for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue! By chance I had just named this most beloved music in my previous post on Manhattan (the film). So, starting now, we can remix the Rhap.

[Feat. image: “Ranx & Mast” by Dr Case is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0]

About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
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