Words

Frank Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have to learn?’ ” – The New Yorker

To be fair, James Daunt was not at all as self-aggrandizing as that headline suggests when he spoke to the Independent Book Publishers Association last week. But he did say that the long-troubled chain has been hanging on despite the pandemic, and that B&N has used the lull in business to start making in earnest the changes that Daunt had introduced at Waterstones in the UK with so much success. – Publishers Weekly

“For readers still thawing from a year in isolation, two questions in [Sesshu Foster’s untitled] poem are especially prescient: ‘How to start again? How to wake up?'” – Los Angeles Times

We’re all looking for something – solitude, connection to nature, an escape from our houses and apartments – and so, publishing is providing us with many (many) nature memoirs. But where to start? Check out this heavily annotated list. – LitHub

“I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes that potential, it enlarges it, it refines it, and each art does it in different ways.” – Conversations with Tyler

The natural world has always been a key subject of Japanese verse, and there’s even an established body of words — kigo — that categorize various phenomena by season and thereby evoke particular emotions. For instance, referring to a typhoon in a poem is supposed to anchor it in the autumn. But Japan, like many other places, is now experiencing “season creep”: the cherry blossoms in Kyoto this year peaked earlier than ever in well over a millennium of recordkeeping, and typhoons may now hit anytime from May to December. Increasingly, the kigo system no longer makes sense. – The Economist

“Eleven years after publishing its first collection of the finest up-and-coming authors in Spanish, Granta magazine is releasing a second volume that brings together 25 writers aged under 35 and now at work on four continents. The list includes 11 female writers and 14 male writers from Spain, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Chile, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Ecuador.” – The Guardian

On the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, near Lake Superior in the northwestern corner of the state, is a K-8 school called Waadookodaading (“a place where people help each other”), where Ojibwe children are taught, in their ancestral language, a curriculum that combines federal and state educational requirements with traditional culture. For instance, the kids study biology using fish they’ve speared, and the wild rice harvest becomes a way to learn how to measure volumes. But the COVID epidemic, which has hit Native Americans harder than any other group in the U.S., has posed special problems for the school. – The Guardian

My desired output for this language is graphical based. I originally envisioned it as a kind of “Processing for Indigenous Languages”. Where the output is generative and graphic. The generative aspect is crucial in the representation of the Indigenous worldview, because when the program ends whatever display was generated is destroyed (comes to end of life). – Esoteric Codes

So what can Hemingway tell us about what American writers owe to Hemingway? Whatever that debt is, it’s a lot, according to the various writers and literary scholars who appear as talking heads in the documentary, but they (Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Mario Vargas Llosa) are fairly long in the tooth, and few young fiction writers would now claim him as a star to steer by. In comparison, the influence of William Faulkner, transfigured in the crucible of Toni Morrison’s genius and legacy, can be detected everywhere. – Slate

“[James] Hyman’s collection now stands at around 150,000 editions of roughly 5,000 titles. They form the bulk of HYMAG, a dedicated magazine library housed in a former factory in Woolwich, south-east London. It’s an overwhelming sight. … It is not just the words that are important, Mr. Hyman stresses, but what surrounds them: the advertisements, the page layouts, the typography and all the other marginalia that have been lost as text has transitioned to the internet.” – The Economist

Today, our world has over 7,000 languages, each with its own words and particular grammar. These languages are so mindbogglingly different that you might think, “anything goes!” But in reality, there are countless possibilities in sound patterns and grammars that never occur. – The Conversation

This has serious consequences for what ought to be the primary function of high school study: developing a love of reading that will last a lifetime. This is next to impossible when your major contact with literature is a guy from the 1500s who wrote with a quill in what might as well be a second language. And when your teachers aren’t theatre people who can bring the works from page to stage, for which they were intended and where they shine. – The Walrus

“Now that I am a published writer, it is against this backdrop, of limited exposure to books in my adolescence, that I find the advice of established authors given to aspiring writers to “read, read and read books” lacking in nuance, unimaginative, and ignorant of the realities of those from backgrounds of scarcity, displacement, and war, like myself.” – Lithub

The verses, typically four lines long and metrical, are called daina. Thanks to an effort to transcribe them in the 19th and 20th centuries, there are now about a million of them collected at the national library in Riga. “Aficionados say this canon of folk poems is as significant as any body of classical literature. … For the past 22 years, Ieva Szentivanyi has been rendering dainas into English. Her first volume was published in 2018 and the second is ready for the press.” – The Economist

“When I wrote this book I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu. All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a brutal sectarianism believes otherwise. … Right now, in India, it’s midnight again.” – The Guardian

Lawrence Venuti’s watershed book, The Translator’s Invisibility (1995), argued that the practice of ignoring the identity of the translator, to the point of being in denial that a work was even a translation at all, was part of an unhelpful hierarchical mindset that erroneously attributed absolute value to the original, ignoring the fact that each new translation was itself a new work of art. – New York Review of Books

“Given these serious—and growing—problems, it’s not whataboutism to wonder why these old books get so much attention. Is it because attacking old books is easier than making the social and economic changes that would improve the actual lives of real children and their parents?” – The Nation

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Work, work your thoughts, and therein see” … anything from Paris to London, Lyme Regis to George Orwell’s final destination. – The Guardian (UK)

There’s truly, in the American literary canon, only one – Merry Levov, of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. What gives? And what do literary writers believe stuttering represents in the first place? – LitHub

Teresa Deevy wrote plays about young women coming to terms with – and pushing back on – the restrictions of life in Catholic Ireland. After Meuniere’s disease caused her to become deaf, “She moved to London to study lip reading and while there became deeply immersed in theatre, deciding to become a playwright so that she ‘would put the sort of life we have in Ireland into a play.'” And when a particularly patronizing, and patriarchal, artistic director cut off her access to Irish National Theatre, she turned to radio. Now? A researcher may have discovered three new plays. – Irish Times

“A precise feeling of fondness accompanies the receipt of a letter from someone you care about. There are as many shades of this feeling as friends in the world. Yet I sometimes leave a letter unopened for days, not knowing if I am ready to read it. A friend I still write to confessed the same thing. I wonder what we think those sealed letters contain.” – LitHub

In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here’s the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives in Germany and Italy and a pair of heroic law enforcement officials in Romania, solved the case. – Vanity Fair

Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of the famously pseudonymous and reclusive author is almost certainly that of writer Domenico Starnone. (The other prime candidate, identified by an investigative journalist in The New York Review of Books, is Starnone’s wife, translator Anita Raja.) Comparative literature scholar Elisa Sotgiu revisits those studies and how they came to their conclusion, and she considers to what extent the gender of the individual (or, perhaps, couple) behind Elena Ferrante is genuinely important. – Literary Hub

Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. – Cabinet Magazine