Instead of writing, the Inkas’ principal bureaucratic tool was the khipu. A khipu consists of a number of strings or cords, either cotton or wool, systematically punctuated with knots, hanging from a master cord or length of wood; pendant cords might also have subsidiary cords. The basis of khipuaccounting practice was the decimal system, achieved by tying knots with between one and nine loops to represent single numerals, then adding elaborations to designate 10s, 100s or 1,000s. – Aeon
Category: words
Study Of Literature Has Become More About Policing Than Enjoyment
The current group of politically minded critics makes a different point. Greatness is a possibility, but only if you’re not politically benighted. The misogyny and racism of major authors don’t just make for bad politics; they make for bad writing. In parodying the stupid ways in which Updike, Philip Roth, or Ian McEwan describe women, feminist readers are offering a kind of aesthetic education — seeking to shame authors into no longer producing such horrible prose and less politically conscious readers into no longer appreciating it. – Chronicle of Higher Education
New York Times Book Critics Have A Roundtable About The Year 2018 In Books
“As you might imagine, as professional critics and general bibliophiles [Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai] read far more than is represented on [their best-books] lists — books their colleagues reviewed, books they found by chance, books that had been teetering on their to-read piles while they attended to the demands of their jobs. Below, they talk about the wide variety of writing they enjoyed, authors who disappointed them and larger trends they noticed in the literary world.” — New York Times
While AIDS Ravaged The Arts World In The 1980s, The New York Times Obituaries Euphemized
“Like most obituaries, these carried the weight of individual lives, many taken too soon. But unlike other obits, they were laced with evasions — omissions effectively erasing a person’s life, effectively erasing AIDS. … Those who lost their lives — many of them pathbreaking artists and individuals who, if still here today, would be running our museums, our publishing houses, our media companies, opera houses, and drama guilds — died before we had enough to remember them by. To trace the stories behind such obituaries is to unearth the very voices that shaped our culture, to recover what’s been lost.” — Slate
Preserving The Literary History Of Embattled Kurdistan
A visit to the Zheen Archive Center in Sulaimani, where “two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of books, manuscripts, and papers that have survived hundreds of years of language bans and the mass destruction of property” during Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish pogroms and the attacks and occupations by ISIS. — The Believer
James Frey Wins 2018 Bad Sex In Fiction Award
“Years after gaining notoriety for embellishing [sic] parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, the US author James Frey has a new notch in his bedpost … Seeing off competition from an all-male shortlist that included Haruki Murakami and the Man Booker prize-nominated Gerard Woodward, Frey won for his novel Katerina, a ‘“fictional retelling’ of a love affair the author started while on a hedonistic trip to France in the 1990s.” — The Guardian
The Evolving Ethos Of Literary Hoaxes
The literature professor’s point is that placing social value on concepts like authenticity is an invitation to manufacture them. A certain style of writing can come across as more authentic, and this can help a book gain status in the literary marketplace. – The New Yorker
What An Obscure German Novel Taught A ‘Politico’ Writer About Dictators And Wannabes
Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns, which takes place largely in 1933, the year Hitler took over the German government, “is a case study in how quickly the institutions of democracy and the habits of civilization can be destroyed and how educated and well-intentioned citizens can watch the destruction proceed without seeing it. … Reading him now — 84 years after the book’s publication and 60 years after the author’s death — the quandaries feel very current.” — Politico
Cornwall, Long Neglected, Needs A Literature Of Its Own
And outsiders can’t really do it justice. “There are recent novels set in Cornwall, but they tend to be about a romanticised past (Poldark casts a long shadow) or sell a fantasy of the place to tourists, making life there sound quaint and trivial. The fantasy is damaging because, behind the veneer of Seasalt clothing and Doom Bar ale, the reality couldn’t be more different: not only is Cornwall the most remote county in England, in terms of geography and transport links, but it is also one of its poorest, with a high suicide rate to boot.”
From T-Shirt To Book Club To Literary Festival, And Now To Book (And Book Tour)
Glory Edim’s anthology Well-Read Black Girl got its start when she got a T-shirt with those words on it as a gift. Now she’s got a massive book club following, a book, a book tour – and the goal of bringing as many Black women writers with her as she can. “We can cherish and uplift black work and artistry across all genres in the literary space,” she says. “Also, we should be using social media and all its glory to uplift the new work that is being created.”