Words

What always seemed most remarkable about the American Heritage Dictionary was its promise to be more discriminating than other dictionaries, and the evidence for this was always its panel of expert language users whose opinions were solicited on many contentious points of usage. This usage panel was presented as a major feature of the dictionary and became a point for endorsement and criticism. – The Weekly Standard

Louis Menand: “If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing … has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited. Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense.” — The New Yorker

In a television landscape where literature has become largely overlooked, late-night hosts like Mr. Meyers and Trevor Noah have made it their mission to put a spotlight on writers — giving them an enormous amount of influence in the publishing world. – The New York Times

“My research finds that a prize’s long-term success actually depends on these kinds of low and embarrassing episodes, which attract public investment into the very market for symbolic capital that makes prizes necessary and keeps them afloat.” James English explains how this phenomenon plays out. — Public Books

The country’s two major bookstore chains are in or near bankruptcy and are closing so many stores that many cities will be left with no place to buy books. The head of one Brazilian publishing firm has been reduced to pleading with the public to buy books as Christmas gifts. — The Guardian

By way of continued labor, poets attempt to craft language that can carry their ideas beyond the passing moment, reframing their experiments as steps toward the ultimate realization of their aesthetic visions. The poet’s will toward synthesis of voice and form is about having something vital to say and knowing time is always running out. – The Atlantic

Language is a system. Sounds, words and grammar do not exist in isolation: each of these three levels of language constitutes a system in itself. And, extraordinarily, these systems change as systems. If one change threatens disruption, another change compensates, so that the new system, though different from the old, is still an efficient, expressive and useful whole. – Aeon

Using AI tools to analyze this piece of literature shed new light on key elements of emotion and memory in the book – but they did not replace the skills of an expert or scholar at interpreting texts or pictures. As a result of our experiment, we think that AI and other computational methods present an interesting opportunity with the potential for more quantifiable, reproducible and maybe objective research in the humanities. – The Conversation

Tracy K. Smith: “Political poetry … has done much more than vent. It has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry.” — The New York Times

Even as hundreds of libraries have closed and thousands of professional library staff been laid off, there are still libraries in Britain left to safeguard. And comedian turned bestselling children’s author David Walliams wants to save them. – The Guardian (UK)

Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, has some questions – and some answers. “No one I know is unaware that this is a particularly weird time to make art, rather than to spend every moment calling your senators. But art has always had to exist alongside history.” – Electric Literature

The actor found out his son was getting bullied at school about their heritage – so he created a stand-up show, got it on Netflix, and is now promoting some top-quality books about Latinx history so other kids don’t have to experience the same thing. Here’s his holiday shortlist of books (that, yeah, Americans should already have read).  – The Atlantic

Natasha Trethewey has been the U.S. poet laureate, is a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and has a new collection out, and it requests from, and gives back, much to its readers. “Trethewey writes into the sprawling and untold stories in America’s history, giving voice to the forgotten, or the memories at risk of being forgotten.” – BuzzFeed

Utter austerity madness continues, as “712 full-time employees lost or left their jobs and volunteer numbers increased by 3,000.” – The Guardian (UK)

“Last night I dreamt I went to Sweet Valley again.” That’s right: This is why we just can’t quit Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield (and their evil friends), the monsters of teen serial books. – BuzzFeed

“To me, there is something thrilling about thinking through the ideas of our time alongside poems and fiction. Literature, with its idiosyncrasies, its heresies, its visions, can provide a kind of subversive push-pull against what the critic Alexandra Schwartz aptly called ‘the rubbery chew’ of op-ed culture.” – Lithub

“[Ailey] O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism — stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers — was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died.” — Vulture

“Digital publications are currently taxed at 20% in the UK; printed publications have been exempt from VAT since its introduction in 1973, ‘on the general principle of avoiding a tax on knowledge’.” Now that new EU legislation allowing member states to cut VAT on digital publications, “a cohort of voices  … is now urging the government to ‘axe the reading tax’.” — The Guardian

“The new movement is wide-ranging, including everything from Russian science fiction – with a history reaching back into the 19th Century – to Afrofuturism, a movement rooted in experiences of black oppression. It covers Chinese books dealing with revolutionary history and aliens, to futurist Mexican movies about migration and free trade.” Tom Cassauwers has a look at the sci-fi coming from these countries and what it says about them. — BBC

The director of the novel’s 2017 film adaptation, Luca Guadagnino, has said several times that he planned to do a sequel (or perhaps even a franchise along the lines of the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series). But the little that the author had said about it wasn’t encouraging. (The novel already includes an epilogue with the two protagonists in middle age.) But a tweet from Aciman this week indicates that he’s changed his mind. — IndieWire

Said Strand owner Nancy Bass Wyden, “The richest man in America, who’s a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies. I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate. Just leave me alone.” — New York Times

Instead of writing, the Inkas’ principal bureaucratic tool was the khipu. A khipu consists of a number of strings or cords, either cotton or wool, systematically punctuated with knots, hanging from a master cord or length of wood; pendant cords might also have subsidiary cords. The basis of khipuaccounting practice was the decimal system, achieved by tying knots with between one and nine loops to represent single numerals, then adding elaborations to designate 10s, 100s or 1,000s. – Aeon

The current group of politically minded critics makes a different point. Greatness is a possibility, but only if you’re not politically benighted. The misogyny and racism of major authors don’t just make for bad politics; they make for bad writing. In parodying the stupid ways in which Updike, Philip Roth, or Ian McEwan describe women, feminist readers are offering a kind of aesthetic education — seeking to shame authors into no longer producing such horrible prose and less politically conscious readers into no longer appreciating it. – Chronicle of Higher Education

“As you might imagine, as professional critics and general bibliophiles [Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai] read far more than is represented on [their best-books] lists — books their colleagues reviewed, books they found by chance, books that had been teetering on their to-read piles while they attended to the demands of their jobs. Below, they talk about the wide variety of writing they enjoyed, authors who disappointed them and larger trends they noticed in the literary world.” — New York Times

A visit to the Zheen Archive Center in Sulaimani, where “two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of books, manuscripts, and papers that have survived hundreds of years of language bans and the mass destruction of property” during Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish pogroms and the attacks and occupations by ISIS. — The Believer