Category: words

Not to mention this price: “I stand apart, casing the joint. Always on the lookout for a good line, the odd detail. It’s what writers and visual artists are trained to do: In the midst of a flood, consider the color of the water. We might or might not get a good story that way, but we’re at least more likely to survive the crisis. “

“I have a big problem with library technology. Let’s be honest, all libraries do! Mainly, the problem is… it sucks. Most of the time our tech already doesn’t work right, somebody decides to break it, and then we don’t have the money to fix anything.”

The first printed Old and New Testaments, reproduced in this new Taschen facsimile edition in two folio volumes, marked a cultural turning point, which was to shape religious controversies and political crises and conflicts throughout the following centuries. The production was technically complex and required an extraordinary amount of careful labour, which included setting 42 lines of text per page, consuming 2,500 bits of type, drawn from a font of 300 distinctive pieces.

Are we winning any converts with this annual orgy of self-righteousness? The rhetoric of Banned Books Week is pitched at such a fervent level that crucial distinctions are burned away by the fire of our moral certainty, which is an ill that wide reading should cure not exacerbate. And what books are actually, effectively “banned” in the United States nowadays? The titles on the Top 10 Most Challenged list, in fact, sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. How many authors would kill to be “challenged” like that?

Laura Kipness: “Allocution is a tough genre. But even when the account is disingenuous and self-pitying, I’m interested in what the accused have to say for themselves, including those I think are guilty and despicable and who haven’t learned the proper lessons from their crimes. One of the reasons we read prison literature is because we’re all guilty and despicable. One of the reasons we read literature as such is to know what it’s like to be a criminal, a coward, a refugee, a pariah. In other words, human. Something significant was lost last week.”

The English philosopher Owen Barfield, a member of the Oxford Inklings in the 1930s and ’40s, whose work as a philologist convinced him that the Romantic tradition was broadly right, put it succinctly. Words have soul, he said. They possess a vitality that mirrors the inner life of the world, and this connection is the source of their power. All forms of language implicitly deploy it. Poets are arguably more alert to it because they consciously seek it out.

“Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden and the husband of Swedish Academy member Katarina Frostenson, was on trial for two counts of rape of a woman that allegedly took place in 2011. The accusations against him triggered a crisis within the prestigious academy, with seven members quitting and the body announcing that no prize will be awarded this year.” At prosecutors’ request lest Arnault flee the country, the trial judge ordered him held in custody until the verdict, expected early next week.

The late Egyptian novelist, best known in the West for ‘the Cairo Trilogy’ (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), won the Nobel for literature in 1988; he remains the only Arab to do so. These unpublished stories were discovered by a journalist who was researching a history of one of Mahfouz’s most controversial books, Children of Gebelawi.