While many people (including more than a few Scottish ones) see the tongue of Robert Burns and Trainspotting as just a thickly accented dialect of English, Scots actually developed independently. (There was no medieval influence from Norman French, for one thing, since William the Conqueror never crossed the border.) But with Scotland having been united with the much larger, richer, more culturally assertive England for several centuries now, Scots came close to being subsumed into English entirely. Yet it has survived, and now it’s even gaining speakers.
Category: words
University Presses Are Thriving
As anger spreads over libraries being squeezed by STEM journals from large for-profits, university presses are growing in part by looking beyond a narrow focus on library markets and publishing for new audiences, branching out into crossover titles, supplemental texts, regional books, popular reference works, manifestos, graphic novels, and the like. It’s an entrepreneurial flourishing that engages new readers, creates new communities, and extends the reputation of those universities fortunate enough to have presses.
A Jack Kerouac Bot? AI Program Produces Novel About Its Own Cross-Country Road Trip
Ross Goodwin rigged up a black Cadillac with a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone, a laptop, and a receipt printer, and he and friends drove it from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Data from the instruments was fed into AI software on the laptop that Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books, and over the four-day trip that software produced prose on the tiny printer. The assembled result, a book titled 1 the Road, “is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot’s life on the interstate; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.”
Patti Smith: ‘Little Women’ Was A Guide For My Young Life
“Through the March girls I came to know extreme poverty and the cost of war. I learned from Jo’s example that art is not produced solely by dreaming but through discipline, steadfast and confident application, and the willingness to accept and grow from astute criticism. Jo, as her creator, was always scribing, littering the floor with her failures, until such skins were shed and she connected with the core of self-expression.”
Sorry, ‘Little Women’ Is Simply Not A Feminist Novel
The second half of the book in particular — originally published, and still sold in Britain, under the separate title Good Wives — “is, for the most part, incredibly dull; most of it is left out of film interpretations. And yet,” argues Hillary Kelly, “it needs to be reckoned with if we’re going to assess what it means for young girls to read Little Women today. … It is obsessed with wifely duty — deferential to patriarchy and dismissive of female ambition of any variety other than the maternal. … It’s downright strange that intelligent women would call a book that disposes of its protagonists’ dreams in order to settle them into lives darning socks ‘required reading’ for young girls today.”
How Dictionary.com Became A Master Of The Tweet
The website’s Twitter account now goes far beyond vocabulary-building blasts, seizing instead on words embedded in the public discourse–and expounding on not only their meaning but the intent behind them.
Goodreads Removes Issues Of Two Speculative Fiction Magazines That Focus On Authors Of Color, But Does Goodreads Even Know Its Own Rules?
Volunteer librarians run Goodreads, sort of. Or do they? And is it true that Goodreads doesn’t allow magazines without ISBNs, or are Goodreads’ rules somewhat, shall we say, open to interpretation? It’s a kerfuffle for the Amazon-owned site.
Margo Jefferson On Being A Critic And The Many Forms Of Codeswitching In Her Memoir
Jefferson’s memoir Negroland won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, partly because of its ability to be personal and critical at the same time. Jefferson says, “I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political.”
Leonard Cohen’s Notebooks In The Freezer (And His Final Poems)
Leonard Cohen’s son says that even talking about his father’s process of writing feels like an invasion. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this … is a transgression,” Adam Cohen says. But a final book of poems “is what he was staying alive for.”
Where Are All The British Working-Class Writers?
In Scotland, of course. “Scotland has an incredible wealth of working-class writers, thanks to a strong community and tradition of support from established authors.” But really, there are English, Welsh, and Northern Irish working-class writers as well, but the working-class writers and their publishers need to see interest from the public.