Philip Nel, a Seuss scholar (yes, there is such a thing): “Yes, there are some examples of him revising in response to criticism, and you can give him credit for that — but I would only give partial credit! … I think what is surprising to people is that this was a guy who throughout his work tried to do anti-racist stuff. Think of Horton Hears a Who — one reviewer who read the book when it was published [in 1954] described it as an argument for the protection of minorities and their rights. … [But] Seuss wasn’t aware that his visual imagination was so steeped in the cultures of American racism. He was doing in some of his books what he was trying to oppose in others.” – Slate
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Dr. Seuss Sales Soar After Publishers Withdraw Six Books With Racist Caricatures
In the wake of the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop printing and selling If I Ran the Zoo, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and four other titles — and of conservative media’s ginned-up outrage — American customers are snapping up all of the author’s children’s books. On Amazon’s bestseller list as of Thursday morning, nine of the top ten and 30 of the top 50 slots were occupied by Dr. Seuss titles. (Naturally, people with used copies of the withdrawn books were charging hundreds of dollars for them.) – The Guardian
Alt-Weeklies Looked Doomed Even Before The Pandemic. Here’s How Some Of Them Have Hung On
The structural troubles those papers were facing before 2020 were bad enough; then COVID shut down their main sources of ad revenue (performance venues, bars and clubs, restaurants). “[Yet] there are many that, against all odds, have survived. In true alt-weekly edge, it’s a stubborn, punk refusal to let go. Here are four of their stories.” – The Daily Beast
Read Nabokov’s Long-Lost Superman Poem, Now In Print At Last
“The Man of To-morrow’s Lament” — written as the superhero’s internal monologue as he walks through the city with Lois Lane, ruing that they can never have children together — was submitted to, and rejected by, The New Yorker in the summer of 1942 and then disappeared. – Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A Critic Reviews 125 Years Of The NYT’s Book Reviews
To wander through 125 years of book reviews is to endure assault by adjective. All the fatuous books, the frequently brilliant, the disappointing, the essential. The adjectives one only ever encounters in a review (indelible, risible), the archaic descriptors (sumptuous). So many masterpieces, so many duds — now enjoying quiet anonymity. – The New York Times
‘Lolita’ Is A Horrifying Story. How Does It Keep Getting Past Obscenity Laws, Let Alone Cancel Culture?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which now seems almost anodyne, was the subject of a criminal prosecution in 1960, but Lolita, which came out the previous year and still has the power to shock, was not. Why? Actor Emily Mortimer, whose father was a barrister who defended more than one client in obscenity trials, uses what she learned from him (“First, it’s very funny. My dad always said you could get away with anything in court as long as you made people laugh”) and others to explain the power of Nabokov’s achievement. – The New York Times
Six Dr. Seuss Books Withdrawn For ‘Hurtful And Wrong’ Portrayals
“Six Dr. Seuss books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo — will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy said Tuesday.” – AP
Bookshop.com Generates £1 Million For Indie UK Bookstores
Bookshop.org was launched in the US a year ago and in the UK in November. Pitching itself as a socially conscious way to buy books online, it allows booksellers to create a virtual shop front. For books ordered directly from these online stores, booksellers receive 30% of the cover price from each sale without having to handle customer service or shipping. When a sale is made and not attributed to a specific bookseller, 10% of the cover price goes into a pot that is split between all of the shops. – The Guardian
Artificial Intelligence Has A Grammar Problem
Sometimes Grammarly doesn’t do what it should, and sometimes it even does what it shouldn’t. These strengths and failings hint at the essence of language and the peculiarity of human intelligence, as opposed to the artificial sort as it stands today. – The Economist
MIT Has Figured Out How To Read Unopened 17th-Century Letters
In those days before mass-produced envelopes, important letters were intricately folded and then sewn shut; until now, modern-day scholars couldn’t read such items without cutting open the stitching and damaging the delicate old paper. MIT scientists have now developed a way to do digital x-ray scans of the letters and use virtual reality software to derive images of what they’d look like if opened. – The New York Times
Off With All Our Heads – The Online World Loves To Misquote Lewis Carroll
But why? Alison Flood investigates why Britain’s Royal Mint and an actual Carroll commemorative collection have been getting quotes wrong … and then printing them on coinage. Cue the facepalm emoji: Turns out it’s all the fault of Goodreads. – The Guardian (UK)
Books: A Coronavirus Lifesaver
At least that’s what a bookseller turned newly-minted Instagram book reviewer (that is, a Bookstagrammer) says. He hasn’t seen his family for nearly two years, a friend has cancer, and his job at Waterstone’s keeps going away and coming back as lockdowns come and go. But reading, and Instagram, are there: “There’s so much to be worried about, and book blogging takes my mind off it.” – BBC
The Lie At The Heart Of The Western – And How Contemporary Novelists Are Fixing It
The first novel to be considered a “Western” came out in 1902, and the tropes it established have lasted for more than a century – white men shooting each other and Indigenous people, and women, if they exist at all, serving those men. But newer novels set in the West “preserve some aspects of the old Westerns: the parched vistas, the isolation, the high-stakes emotion of characters running afoul of the law. But they also call into question the genre’s basic premise: the idea of the frontier as a place to be mastered and overcome. Instead, the Western becomes a way of thinking about humans’ relationship to land, the past, and the idea of home.” – The Atlantic
Writers Are Exposing Sexual Abuse – And Deeply Horrible Attitudes – In France
Why now? “While it is illegal in France for an adult to have sex with a minor under the age of 15, there is no age of consent; if there is no evidence of threats or violence, the adult will not be charged with rape. In 2018 … ministers proposed introducing an age of consent, which has yet to pass. A recent poll estimated that one in 10 French people have been the victim of sexual abuse within the family as children.” But writers, and books, are pushing back. – The Guardian (UK)
The Internet Archive Digitizes A Lot Of Books
How does that work? With a lot of human effort, and at a mind-blowing pace of 3500 books per day. “Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages.” – Open Culture
What Will Happen If Publishing Giants Merge?
“Perhaps the industry’s biggest concern about the merger, especially among agents and authors, is what it will mean for book deals. An agent representing a promising author or buzzworthy book often hopes to auction it to the highest bidder. If there are fewer buyers, will it be harder for agents to get an auction going for their clients, and ultimately, will it be harder for authors to get an advantageous deal?” – The New York Times
How Novels Can Help Plan Our Way Through COVID Recovery
As sources for possible future scenarios capable of providing strategic foresight, or producing alternative future plans, novels can also help businesses create dialogue on difficult and even taboo subjects. Novels are, therefore, capable of helping managers become better, providing them with creative insight and wisdom. Science fiction can provide a means to explore morality tales, a warning of possible futures, in an attempt to help us avoid or rectify that future. – The Conversation
Is It Time… Finally… To Kill The Book Blurb?
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.” – The Wall Street Journal
Literature Is A Technology, And It Should Be Taught Like One
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 need to find these technologies, these inventions, and connect them to your head, see what they can do for your brain.” – Nautilus
Stage Actors In Paris Offer ‘Poetic Consultations’ By Phone
“‘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 a lockdown initiative by a prominent Paris playhouse, the Théâtre de la Ville, in order to keep its artists working while stages remained dark.” – The New York Times
The Nobel Winner Who’s Not All That Crazy About Writing
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 do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.” – The New York Times Magazine
Whatever The Pandemic May Have Thrown At You, There’s A German Word For It
“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
When The Masses First Started To Read Widely…
“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 adults and children. As a consequence, they came to see others—people they did not know personally—as like them, as having the same kind of inner emotions.” – LitHub
Big Publishing’s New Editors
“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 the big-five publishers to hire executives and editors of color has been viewed by some as a sea change for the industry.” – New York Magazine
Why Literary Canons Are Important
“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 the technological improvements in the replication and dissemination of literary texts.” – LitHub