Category: words

University of Chicago religion and ethics scholar Myriam Renaud offers a refresher course.

“Much of the anger discussed in all these books comes from being thwarted — from the inability to command respect, equality, control over one’s body and destiny, or from witnessing the oppression of other women. One of the pitfalls in trying to establish equality is to confuse gaining power with unleashing rage. For all of us this is the conundrum: How, without idealizing and entrenching anger, can we grant nonwhite people and nonmale people an equal right to feeling and expressing it?”

“On Monday, in the magazine’s first statement discussing [now-former editor Ian Buruma’s] departure, it described the “considerable concern” over the essay among readers, adding, ‘We acknowledge the validity of this criticism.’ … While citing Mr. Ghomeshi’s free-speech rights, the magazine described ‘our failures in the presentation and editing’ of the essay” — in particular, departures from usual editing practices and the bypassing of most editorial staff.

What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass. Except that you do notice the glass.

One book survey found that the average number of pages had increased from 320 to 400 pages between 1999 and 2014. Some think that the shift to digital formats has contributed, not least in removing the fear of being crushed beneath your duvet by your bedtime reading. Val McDermid, another of the judges, cited the inexperience of editors; commercial pressures which deny them the time they need to spend on books; and the unwillingness of writers to listen.

First, the author’s heirs have to want that – and they have to pick the new author carefully. (Often they do want it because, well, money.) One author got good advice from a friend: “He said, ‘Reed, I’m a huge Elvis fan and I’ve seen the greatest Elvis impersonators in the world. And sadly, there’s two things they cannot escape. First, no matter how good their act, I always know it’s not really Elvis. Second, they can never do anything new.'”

Consider the map in Treasure Island: “We are now habituated to regard cartography as a science: an endeavour of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the representation of a given place. But before it was a field science, cartography was – as Stevenson proved – an art.”

In this town of 8,500 people in Germany, both bakeries closed, and the bookshop was having a hard time – so it was time for a combination of Brötchen and Bücher. (The Wurst came a little later.)

The wave of articles about “the rise of African SFF” or “the rise of Afrofuturism” sound familiar because they’re almost exact replicas of the same genre of articles from about 10 years ago – and those were similar to the previous wave of articles discussing the same thing. Indeed, the articles are “perpetuators of a gentle literary oppression that keeps African science fiction infantile.”