Words

“Drag queen storytime began popping up in 2015 in San Francisco and have spread across the country to libraries, community centers, and increasingly, bookstores. … Protests are commonplace at the readings and some communities have even seen lawsuits attempting ban such readings, though these efforts have largely been thwarted by the courts.” — Publishers Weekly

“Proust composed by an immensely complex process of writing and rewriting, weaving together passages sometimes composed years apart, filling his margins with additions and, when the margins ran out, continuing on strips of paper glued to the pages.” Carol Clark writes about the challenges of editing and translating The Prisoner, one of three volumes the author didn’t live to see through publication himself. — Literary Hub

Given the scope of the looting, the task ahead remains mountainous. In Berlin, for example, at the Central and Regional Library, almost a third of the 3.5 million books are suspected to have been looted by the Nazis, according to Sebastian Finsterwalder, a provenance researcher there. “Most major German libraries have books stolen by the Nazis,” he said. – The New York Times

Sans Forgetica is purposefully hard to decipher, forcing the reader to focus. One study found that students recalled 57 percent of what they read in Sans Forgetica, compared with 50 percent of the material in Arial, a significant difference. No word yet on the retention rate of Comic Sans. – Wired

Here’s the rub: Monitors pay closer attention to material that might be consumed by the average person than to cultural products seen as highbrow and intended for educated groups. (An internet forum versus an old novel.) As a result, Chinese writers are watched more closely than foreign ones. — The Atlantic

Whether or not most lit professors agree with that (Roland Barthes) statement now, “authors certainly had it coming.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading: It’s a lifestyle thing. “Candles are also now a common impulse purchase at independent bookstores, along with tote bags and coffee. There are shelves upon shelves of literary-themed ones at the Strand in New York, which famously brags of 18 miles of books.” – The New York Times

“The point of this is—women own the things that happen to them, even if these things happened between them and much more powerful or well-known men. Writing about these things does not make women narcissists.” – LitHub

The bookstore in Argentina, which opened in a building modeled after the Paris Opera, won the title in 2019 – 18 years after NPR’s Bob Mondello first filed this report. – NPR

Reading through dossier after dossier on 16 American writers contained in Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, what strikes you immediately is the terrifying absurdity of Hoover’s obsession with anyone who didn’t follow his patriotic party line and dared to express critical concern about the national psyche in well-written words.  – New Statesman

There was a time when writers – of books, of magazine articles – could make a decent middle class living. That’s increasingly rare. And yet, if anything, we’re reading more. So what has happened? – The New York Times

As prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party continues to encourage an exclusionary Hindu version of Indian nationalism, more liberal-minded Indians (by no means only Muslims) are reading, writing, reciting, and listening — in venues from tea shops to stadiums — to poetry in Urdu, the (to oversimplify) Islamized version of Hindi that has a revered, centuries-old tradition of verse across the subcontinent. — The Guardian

Following a particularly nasty campaign from certain book critics, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was blocked from publication and circulation in the UK as “obscene libel.” But thousands of letters poured in to Hall from supporters; one such read, “No one could finish your book, Miss Hall, without donning a sword and shield forever in the cause of inverts.” — The Guardian

As print designer Jordan Wannemacher says, “You have to have a really strong grid, you have to consider the practical physical nature of the package (is there enough room for your hands to hold the pages on the margins? will the type of binding make elements close to the gutter disappear?), you have to design anywhere from 20-200+ unique elements while ensuring they are all cohesive and unified.” — Spine

While other outlets butted heads over the right to be contemptuous and the still-thriving Gawker published a polemic against smarmy positivity, the Millions sidestepped the debate entirely. The sincerity of the site was singular, and refreshing — although some people remained skeptical. – New York Magazine

Helen Betya Rubinstein: “I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise. … Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.” — Literary Hub

The essay is a marginal, even trivial form, yet is also deeply and seriously engaged with the weightiest questions of how a philosophical and political subject can be constituted out of a particular body and mind. Essayistic writing—as opposed to strict autobiography, which may simplify and explain a life through narrative—shows what is at stake when we say “you”: another “I.” – Public Books

New Republic cultural critic Josephine Livingstone: “Kennings are essentially portmanteaus, Old English words made of two nouns that have been mashed together to create a new one. … For example, hron means ‘whale.’ Rad means ‘a road,’ or ‘a path.’ Put them together … and you get hronrad, or ‘whale-road,’ which means ‘the sea.’ The ocean is not an empty space, hronrad says — it belongs to the whale.” — The New York Times

Okay, so maybe you haven’t spent a lot of time pondering this. But Sam Dresser’s discussion here illuminates something in how we construct systems for communicating. Are the differences mainly in overlap of common words? – Aeon

“There are objective criticisms you can make, you can point stuff out, but how you decide to rate or value the things done well, how much you penalise the things done less well—it’s a semi-random choice. It’s also hard to distinguish from the exercise of deep prejudice. You can use a softer word than prejudice, like bias, or even turn it into a term of praise—you can call it taste.” – Prospect

“[Today,] conspiracy theories are customized to achieve desired political outcomes and then injected into the news stream via social media. … No, with swiftboating, birtherism, voter fraud, anti-vaxxing, Pizzagate, crisis actors, false flags, and alternative facts, the conspiracy theory has clearly been weaponized in the most cynical and partisan way. So where does this leave conspiracy fiction? Well, sort of in the lurch.” — Vulture

“While terms like herd, swarm, and pack seem more or less reasonable, others are downright ridiculous — and that’s probably because they were never meant to be taken seriously.” — Quartz

The paper has struggled as a business for decades and has a terrible history of cutting its cultural coverage, repeatedly signalling its lack of investment in the life of the city. –DMagazine

For the second year in a row, statistics show that indies are doing better than fine. That comes after a steady 20-year decline, so the numbers still feel surprising. – The Guardian (UK)

But he was in his 40s, and so it wasn’t as filled with possibility and joy as it might have been when he was in his 20s. “The bookstore is a liminal space. Even if like me you don’t have the cash to buy a box of new titles and reinvent yourself week to week, you have the moment of the choosing and everything it tugs upon.” – LitHub

Heck yeah, books and beer. Or really, books and a brewpub. How is this not in every city in the U.S. already? – The New York Times