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Hacker News Comments on
Language As Disclosure: Reading Language in the Works of Five American Modernists

Carolyn Norman Slaughter · 2 HN comments

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Amazon Summary

Written in the 1980’s, heyday of Deconstruction in university English Departments, Carolyn Norman Slaughter’s study probes the ways that language “works” in the literature of a few American modernist authors. Slaughter’s purpose is not to prove the futility and “meaning”lessness of language, as Deconstruction was striving to do at the time, but instead to recover the first-order importance and power of language, its radical effects, as set out in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger where language works to disclose, reveal, unfold (Erschließen). However, German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889 -1976) seems an unlikely hero to introduce into the 21st Century. His 1930’s Nazi stain (his misplaced hopes for and brief affiliation with the early Nazi movement ) and his mid-century ostracism from American and Continental literary studies during the Deconstruction period served to minimize or mute his influence during the last decades of the 20th Century. Moreover, his private “black notebooks,” written from 1931 into the 70’s, have recently come to light prompting yet another problematic re-assessment of his life and thought and legacy. Slaughter, however, remains undaunted. She has refocused her book. Minimizing the scholarly trappings, she presents “Heideggerian” readings of five familiar books that will inspire readers to reread the American works closely with clarity, intensity, and pleasure. Language As Disclosure could be beneficially read in college literature classes or in any reader’s own personal armchair. In any case, its “disclosures” may work anew to reawaken and stir original human questions, to excite and energize the readers who can ask them.

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Jan 19, 2021 · eslaught on NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

* Table of contents: solved by Pandoc.
* Inserting special characters: personally I don't find those "character choosing" windows to be very convenient. Hunt and peck is a slow way to type! Anyway, you can do this in Markdown with either Unicode (if you have the right keyboard) or you can write HTML escape codes (&tm; etc.)
* Automatic (grammar/spelling). I don't like check as I type, but sure. Anyway, Emacs provides this if I want it.
* Macros. Hello? Emacs? (Also, Pandoc has a scripting interface.)
I may not be published yet but I've written my own book. I've also published books for other people. I did both of those with a Markdown-based toolchain. It works.
Edit: Just to prove the point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692553916 . Go see for yourself how the book is formatted.

⬐ masukomi
pandoc, emacs, and scripting are _not_ a realistic option for most writers. They're writers, not programming geeks.
I'm a Markdown fan, but really there _are_ better solutions for book writing that maintain the ease that Markdown brings. Things like ASCIIDoc.

⬐ michaericalribo
And in emacs, you can insert essentially any Unicode character with `C-x 8 RET`...add swiper and you're off to the races :)
Also, if emacs was good enough for Neal Stephenson, I'm sold...though I hear he uses Scrivener now!

⬐ chipotle_coyote
The "inserting special characters" one is a bit of a "eh?" for most of us Mac users, I think, since most special characters can be typed using the Option key and the character chooser (which is indeed not very convenient!) is system-wide and should work in a native build of at least the GUI version of Emacs. But, yep -- Markdown and Word aren't the same categories of things. How comfortable your Markdown editing experience is depends on how comfortable your Markdown editor is.
(Also, I wrote a Markdown-to-ePub script, too! Although I don't think anything I've got up online uses it anymore.)

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Jun 20, 2019 · eslaught on Publishing Simple Books with Jekyll

Pandoc is definitely the way to go in terms of ease of writing and the quality of the output.
It's not super difficult to take Jekyll-ish input and generate books from it either, e.g. I built a tool to do this:
https://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/bookmd
Example of a book I published with this approach: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692553916 (a fairly challenging type setting problem with lots of footnotes, foreign language, etc.)
The main gotchas are that if you really want it to look good you have to dig into the Latex template, so ultimately it would take more effort to make it push-button for non-technical users.

Hacker News Comments on Language As Disclosure: Reading Language in the Works of Five American Modernists

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Hacker News Comments on
Language As Disclosure: Reading Language in the Works of Five American Modernists