Words

Rebecca Jennings — who confesses to having read each of the Harry Potter books at least ten times and insists she’s “not advocating for laziness” — points to research on “repeated hedonic experiences” that explains why those repeated experiences are hedonic (that means pleasurable) and, in fact, good for you. – Vox

Okay, they didn’t win every single prize there was at the annual honors for science fiction (men won for the best film and television scripts, for instance), but female creators took home the awards for best novel, novella, novelette, short story, graphic story, fan fiction, fanzine, fancast, and fan art. Not bad for a genre that was considered more or less closed to most women not so long ago. – The Verge

“As any digital marketeer with their crosshairs on millennials will tell you, the way we “consume” culture has fragmented. Put in less depressing terms, we have a greater range of representative voices to choose from than in Brett Easton Ellis’s decadent brat-pack days. The aim of publishing now should be to widen that range further.” – The Guardian

At age 90, the MIT professor has been an éminence grise of the American left for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is, above all, an academic linguist who has made major (if controversial) contributions to his field. Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press (and a former student of Chomsky’s as well as editor of his books), talks with him about language versus birdsong, linguistics and machine learning, and his most famous (and most misunderstood) sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – The MIT Press Reader

Few of the newspaper obituarists seemed to know quite what he had done. He had been involved in something that had changed the way texts are interpreted; but it was not really clear why that was so Earth-shattering. – Times Literary Supplement

“There’s a tendency among some Anglophones to see the official struggle to resist English as somewhat hysterical. That attitude partly reflects the smugness of a people who increasingly expect to see their language everywhere they go—and who are accustomed to English’s ability to shamelessly gobble up terms from other tongues. If you see France’s efforts as a celebration of linguistic biodiversity, however, then the ingenuity employed in French’s defense make more sense.” – CityLab

War and Peace? Bring it! Every single word of Silas Marner? Amateurs! What about 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes? Bliss! “‘There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,’ says Celia De Wolff, who has produced and directed a marathon adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over three days” in Britain. “Event radio like this gives the audience a sense of achievement.” – The Observer (UK)

Olivia Laing won a £10,000 prize for her novel Crudo over the weekend. But Laing said, in her acceptance speech, “Crudo was written against a kind of selfishness that’s everywhere in the world right now, against an era of walls and borders, winners and losers. Art doesn’t thrive like that and I don’t think people do either. We thrive on community, solidarity and mutual support and as such, and assuming this is agreeable to my fellow authors, I’d like the prize money to be split between us, to nourish as much new work as possible.” – The Guardian (UK)

Sure, some of this is funny – “One edition of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story referred to itself on the back cover as Animals Farm: A Fair Story. The preface referred to another great Orwell work, Homage to Catalonia, as Homepage to Catalonia – but overall, not so great (or funny). “Until recently, improving Orwell was not a practical business proposition. Then Amazon blew the doors off the heavily curated literary world.” – The New York Times

Martin, famously far, far behind on his books in The Song of Ice and Fire series (which became The Game of Thrones on HBO), says, “Having the show finish is freeing, because I’m at my own pace now. I have good days and I have bad days and the stress is far less, although it’s still there… I’m sure that when I finish A Dream of Spring you’ll have to tether me to the Earth.” – The Observer (UK)

India is a huge country with many different regional cuisines. But cookbooks haven’t reflected that – until now. “As the publishing industry’s view of Indian cuisine approaches homogenization … recent years have seen a quiet renaissance of cookbooks focused on particular communities and geographies of India. Some are published privately by earnest ladies’ community groups and some are printed by small presses, while a few are helmed by big publishing houses. And it is through these essential books that we consume our country.” – LitHub

Dorothy West was called Zora Neale Hurston’s “Kid Sister,” and her books were not immediate successes, partly, some say, because she wrote about the Black middle class. “She wrote ‘posh black’ at a time when ‘broke black’ was in vogue, and this sits at the heart of her flickering obscurity, a myopia in mainstream culture that struggled to perceive blackness as anything more than one-dimensional.” – The Guardian (UK)

The cartoonist’s essay about the rise of superheroes is online, and he makes his opinion clear: “International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.” – The Guardian (UK)

This week in comics news: “Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, withdrew his introduction to a new Marvel comics collection after its publisher insisted he remove a description of Donald Trump as ‘Orange Skull,’ drawing a comparison between the president and Captain America’s fascist enemy, the Red Skull.” – Newsweek

“He would reject work, but praise the writing. His form rejections included a note: “It happens that I am both the editor of the Blue Moon and also the head of a critical revision business. If you have your manuscript revised I, as editor of the Blue Moon, shall then be glad to consider your story for publication in the magazine.” More than 30 writers agreed. Jessup took their money, and kept their stories.” – Literary Hub

Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up. Perhaps this is why, even though the idea that language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing much has been done to mitigate it: it’s a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply never materialised. That is because it is unscientific nonsense. – The Guardian

“The New Colossus” (“Give me your tired, your poor, …”) was not mainstream American sentiment when Emma Lazarus wrote it in 1883 (one year after the Immigrant Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act). Indeed, it was somewhat radical, and she was inspired by the work she did with the despised refugees who were flooding the U.S. in her day (Jews from the Russian Empire). Slate history maven Rebecca Onion talks with Lazarus biographer Esther Schor about the poem and how its reception has changed over the decades. – Slate

It’s not only because so many people learn them as second or third languages. Recent research has indicated that, even when a language is new or developing, it has to have simple rules in order for large groups of people who don’t know each other well to make themselves understood. – The Economist

When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived. – The Guardian

“In Sub-Saharan Africa, … ‘book fairs’ have been publishing industry affairs where players meet to do deals … away from the reading public. Until recently. In the last decade and a half, there has been a rise of a new kind of literary festival where writers and readers interact over their text and how it affects their lives.” – Quartz

“Genesis was capable of making dozens of inferences about the story and several discoveries. It triggered concept patterns for ideas that weren’t explicitly stated in the story, recognizing the themes of violated belief, origin story, medicine man, and creation. It seemed to comprehend the elements of Crow literature, from unknowable events to the concept of medicine to the uniform treatment of all beings and the idea of differences as a source of strength.” – Nautilus

Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, along with English, assign Greek this particular honor. In the Baltic languages, it’s Spanish; the Bulgarians use “Patagonian.” And the Greeks? They, along with more nations than any other, use Chinese to signify the incomprehensible. Dan Nosowitz looks into the origins of the expression. – Atlas Obscura

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, which recounts his escape from Iran to Indonesia and onward to Australia by boat, has just won the $25,000 National Biography Award, the fourth prize it has received in a year. Boochani composed the book text message by text message, which he sent from the detention center on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. – The Guardian

“I got kind of tired seeing classics just for scholarly use or school use,” says the inveterate reader who became frustrated, she says, with clunky, boring or dated designs of books, which were not intended to appeal to new readers. “It’s not many publishers that have set up a classics backlist like this. It’s usually the big multinationals … they can print huge quantities of these books and warehouse them across the world. I’m just starting small.” – Toronto Star

“We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals. We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys — rules that enliven our social interactions.” – The Atlantic