Category: words

Der Rosendorn (The Rose Thorn), about a young woman’s argument with her own vagina about which of them men care more about, had been thought to date from the early 16th century. But a strip of parchment found in the library of an Austrian monastery indicates that the bawdy verse story was written ca. 1300 (if not earlier). – The Guardian

Most textbooks have said that the first English sonnet sequence was Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). Yet three decades earlier, Anne Vaughan Lock’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, a 26-stanza paraphrase of Psalm 51, was published as an appendix in a 1560 volume of Lock’s own translations of a set of Jean Calvin’s sermons. – The New Yorker

The humanists tried out a lot of new punctuation ideas, but most of those marks had short life spans. Some of the printed texts that appeared in the centuries surrounding the semicolon’s birth look as though they are written partially in secret code: they are filled with mysterious dots, dashes, swoops, and curlicues. – Paris Review

As more and more coursework winds up online, the Balkanization of teaching resources cuts ever deeper. – Wired

Wow, thanks for your data mining project, New York Public Library! Why, though? Because “until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed.” And most people – and publishers – did not renew that registration. – Boing Boing

Tim Waterstone – no longer associated with the stores that bear his name – says that “the competition simply wasn’t up to scratch. ‘I didn’t feel guilty,’ he says. ‘I’d just have to say, no, they had a shot.'” – The Observer (UK)

The author of the viral hit short story “Cat Person” says that it’s not easy. to deal with constant questions about sex. “Write a book about the way young women use words to fight back against those who want to reduce them to sexual objects, and you may struggle to prevent yourself from becoming similarly reduced.” – The Guardian (UK)

That is, reader’s block means you’re not reading a book. Why? – The New York Times

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ first book, the short story collection The Heads of Colored People, is short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize (a prize for a book that follows Burn’s “bold footsteps” and “enters history and dares to interrogate the past”). But why write about painful topics? The author: “I think the goal of a writer should be to tell the truth in some way, even if it’s to tell it slant – or to imagine a better version of the truth. We have to find ways to confront difficult subjects.” – The Guardian (UK)

“Can good writing truly be taught? Is the traditional workshop structure—a writer stays silent while her peers lay bare her pages—good pedagogy or licensed cruelty? What people, and what size bank accounts, are allowed safe passage through exclusive academic programs? And, more importantly, what effect do all these factors have on the writer herself?” – The Walrus