Category: words

“Despite praise in his lifetime from Langston Hughes, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, as well as – in later years – John Waters and Jonathan Franzen, Purdy … cast out by the US literary establishment,” which wasn’t ready for either his experimental style or his outré subject matter. (Nelson Algren called one of Purdy’s books “a fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera [about] prayer and faggotry.”) And Purdy’s delight in burning bridges didn’t help. – The Guardian

“On December 4, 1950, two years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot stood behind a lectern in the Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y and read some of his best work in front of hundreds of people.” The director of the Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and the poet Billy Collins recently came across audio of that event, and they’ve offered excerpts for streaming. – The New York Times

The reason is inertia, basically: “[English] got there first, and there is no major expansion of globalization to shift the balance to another language. Today there are far more non-native English speakers than native speakers, and this means that English isn’t about the USA or the UK, but instead about its international use across cultures.” – Quartz (Quora)

There are last year’s scandals, the excessive secrecy, the ridiculously overdue reforms. (Only after the 2018 debacle did the Swedish Academy decide that it would expel any members with conflicts of interest or criminal investigations.) “The Nobel Prize in literature must become more transparent, more inclusive, and more positive,” argues Carrie Mullins, “or it risks being nothing at all.” – Electric Literature

Often described as “Instapoets”, there are several writers sharing short fragments online to enormous followings. The biggest of these audiences belongs to 26-year-old Rupi Kaur: the author of two poetry collections, she has 3.5 million Instagram followers and has received by far the most media attention of any Instapoet. On her Instagram account, she alternates beautiful pictures of herself in elegant outfits with short poems written entirely in lower-case; many young, attractive poets have followed this winning template. – New Statesman

Why do we need it? Automatically produced texts use language models derived from statistical analysis of vast corpuses of human-generated text to produce machine-generated texts that can be very hard for a human to distinguish from text produced by another human. These models could help malicious actors in many ways, including generating convincing spam, reviews, and comments — so it’s really important to develop tools that can help us distinguish between human-generated and machine-generated texts. – Boing Boing

Why, to amplify meaning, of course. Or because you’re writing about Tudor England. In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, for instance, “all the leading male characters apart from Henry VIII are named Thomas (it was the second-most-popular name in Tudor England). There is Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless hero. Thomas Wolsey, the Catholic cardinal. Thomas More, the Catholic zealot. Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury. And Thomas Boleyn, the depraved father of Anne Boleyn.” – The Atlantic

It’s been 25 years, but not much time at all. “In many ways 1992 seems much longer ago than a quarter century; yet, while much has changed, many challenges remain to the publication of work by women of African descent.” – The Guardian (UK)

The owner of City Books in Hove says the record-breaking £30 million self-help book business is new, but not confusing. “In 25 years of business, [Paul] Sweetman says he’s never known customers more in need of uplifting reading than they are now – a result, he believes, of the political climate both here and abroad.” – The Observer (UK)

Carolyn Keene didn’t exist; nor did Franklin W. Dixon, purported author of the Hardy Boy series. Who the writers actually were isn’t germane, really. “What was important was the author as a brand—a shortcut for readers to know that they were getting a consistent product—and arguably, in the case of Nancy Drew, a more consistent product than they might have received if Carolyn Keene had been a single individual. A real Carolyn Keene might have become bored of the project, she might have died, she might have decided to alter Nancy—make her older, marry her off, or gasp, even have her meet her end with the roadster plunging off a cliff.” – CrimeReads