In 1936, George Orwell claimed that “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” was causing the public to turn away from novels altogether. “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day,” he wrote in an essay, “and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing.” -...
Neuroscientist-turned-English-professor Angus Fletcher: "It's a machine designed to work in concert with another machine, our brain. The purpose of the two machines is to accelerate each other. … We've been taught in school to interpret literature, to say what it means, to identify its themes and arguments. But when you do that, you're working against literature. I'm saying we...
"'I am calling you for a poetic consultation,' said a warm voice on the telephone. 'It all starts with a very simple question: How are you?' Since March, almost 15,000 people around the world have received a call like this. These conversations with actors, who offer a one-on-one chat before reading a poem selected for the recipient, started as...
Kazuo Ishiguro: "In some ways, I suppose, I'm just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it's because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn't make it as a singer-songwriter. It's not something I've wanted to do every minute of my life. It's what I was permitted to...
"Over the past year, German has coined some 1,000-plus new terms endemic to the Now Times. … And that's thanks to the language's rules of compound noun formation, which dictate that you can make a new, longer legitimate word out of almost any existing ones." Germanist and recovering academic Rebecca Schuman is our guide. - Slate
"It has recently been argued that reading novels, especially epistolary novels, helped people in the 18th century to put themselves in other people’s shoes, and sensitized them to cruelty in everyday life, savage punishments and abuses of human rights: In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even...
"By the time that America’s reckoning on race reached a fever pitch last year, publishing was months into a messy upheaval of its own. On Twitter, publishing insiders railed against the blinding whiteness of the industry, while writers of color used #PublishingPaidMe to show that they often received far less money than their white peers. The resulting move by...
"For those who view the very notion of the canon as inherently elitist, it’s worth noting that the phenomena mostly clearly implicated in its formation were the democratizing processes of the late 19th and early 20th century: the massive extension of free education—not just to little white proto-patriarchs, but to girls, and children from diverse communities as well—together with...
"Google is negotiating individual licensing deals with a divided Spanish news industry that could allow the U.S. tech giant's news service to resume in the country. … Google News, which links to third party content, closed in Spain in late 2014 in response to legislation which meant it had to pay a mandatory collective licensing fee to re-publish headlines...
Uyghur, a Turkic language that uses the Arabic alphabet, has about 10 million native speakers, most of them in the Xinjiang province of northwestern China. With the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a campaign to suppress the Uyghur minority and their language (including scrubbing Uyghur websites based in China from the Web), a WeChat group of academics, translators, and...
"The French government is appealing for corporate help to acquire the manuscript of the Marquis de Sade's notorious The 120 Days of Sodom, valued at €4.5m (£3.9m), for the National Library of France." - The Guardian
Sometimes, virtual isn't going to cut it - and certainly won't replace "the interstitial socializing, the sidewalk conversations on the way to the next bar, the hungover confessionals of the diner booth, the 4 am rants about art and life and the absurdities of corporate publishing. … Finding their way through it all, giving it purpose and passion, are...
A researcher comes up against French bureaucracy: "To learn more about the day-to-day life of Parisians during the war, I turned to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). This modern library is made up of four buildings in a configuration that resembles four open books; however, the public resources are less accessible than this design would suggest, with the tomes for...
“The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.” - The Guardian
"In 2009, the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and- crafts stores, began acquiring a series of weathered fragments advertised as Dead Sea Scrolls, including this one, … were displayed at the Museum of the Bible. … Last spring, however, scientific analysis proved what a number of biblical scholars had begun to suspect: the sixteen...
