Emoji/Shorthand novels?

Over at Wonders and Marvels, there’s a post up about novels published in shorthand. http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2014/10/novels-in-shorthand.html

I’m intrigued by this, since there’s been a push lately to write/read/treat as a serious scholarly enterprise novels written in emoji. In fact, this is what some of the cool kids seem to be doing these days in pressing the edge on media studies and digital humanities: http://www.ox.ac.uk/event/ukiyo-e-emoji-museums-digital-age. It seems to me there’s a continuum between this and other forms of electronic production based on symbols.

But since I keep up with future tech but study bygone tech in a bygone age, wouldn’t shorthand novels be just the thing? Couldn’t we treat these as attempts at a digital language and I’ve tried reading some of the novelty 19c. novels written in Morse code, but they were too impenetrable unless you’re fluent in the code.  I can read and write a little shorthand, though (Gregg, not Pittman), and I am wondering about the reading differences among these systems.

If Yosemite upgrade broke Mail on your Mac, here’s a solution

After upgrading to Yosemite, Mail crashed repeatedly on my Mac. I checked several online solutions, but here is a much simpler solution that worked for me:

1. Go to System Preferences.Click on Internet Accounts.

2. Delete each of your email accounts by highlighting it and pressing the little minus bar (next to the + button) at the bottom left of the pop-up window.

3. Open Mail and be sure it’s working and not crashing.  Close Mail.

4. Go back to System Preferences -> Internet Accounts. Add back each email address one by one. To do this, click on the + icon and add the information.

5. Check Mail after each new email address to be sure that Mail is still working. It will take a little time for Mail to repopulate your Inbox folders, etc., but it works.

I’ve had to do this process whenever the iPad updates its OS and the mail client quits working, so I’m glad it works for other Macs as well.

It’s a nuisance to do this, true, but it’s less onerous than trying to find folders like Mail -> Library -> Bundles or temporarily disable and then rebuild the mailboxes.

SSAWW-NW Meeting, October 18

The SSAWW-Pacific Northwest Study Group met at Whitworth University on October 18. Organized by LuElla D’Amico, the meeting was devoted to a discussion of Elizabeth Duquette and Cheryl Tevlin’s recent edition of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s stories, essays, and poems. Elizabeth Duquette was at the meeting and shared her insights with us. She explained that Phelps’s papers are scattered among several archives, making study of her work more difficult.

Phelps is an underrated writer (one of the topics of our conversation). Although she was famous and popular in her time, her reputation has revived with The Story of Avis, The Gates Ajar, and Doctor Zay, but not far enough. I’m especially interested because my first chapter of BItter Tastes discusses several of her works.