Category: words

Eight years ago, there were only a handful of libraries run by volunteers – around 10, estimates Public Libraries News. These days, 500 of the UK’s 3,800 libraries are operated by ordinary people, working for free in a role once regarded as a profession. The rise of volunteer libraries goes hand in hand with closures: in 2017 alone, 105 public libraries around the country closed, according to the Chartered institute of public finance and accountancy, bringing the total number of closures since they began counting in 2010 to almost 600.

Listen, I delight in telling weird stories about what’s happening in the library. I truly love it. I make jokes about silly things the patrons do (aggravating, frustrating, truly bonkers annoying things, sure), but I would rather cut off my own arm than reveal anyone’s personal information.

Anyone who has read the Little House on the Prairie books, either for themselves or to their kids, probably remembers the depictions of Native Americans, not to mention Pa’s episode of blackface and minstrel performance. The librarians certainly haven’t forgotten that. “A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major children’s book award, over concerns about how the author portrayed African Americans and Native Americans.”

OK, that’s a ridiculous claim. But: “In the perpetual present of social media, when personal presentation, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, is everything, these autofictions offer an alternative, experimental narrative of self. They are attempts to reshape and repurpose a literary form.”

Wow: “‘There’s a saying in Turkey: if you want to be a writer, you need to go to prison’ says PEN International board member Burhan Sönmez. ‘Everybody repeats it. It’s a good joke, but still a fact for our generation.'”

“I think most writers are wedded to social realism, these days — social realism is the only genre left. And there’s been a contraction, as I was saying, of what you can expect from the reader. It’s not a conscious decision to cease to be as complex as you might once have been; it’s just going with the flow of things. It was Trilling, wasn’t it, who said we like complex books? The truth is, we may once have liked them, but we don’t anymore.”

“UCL, in collaboration with audiobook giant Audible, measured the physical reactions of 102 participants aged between 18 and 67 to audio and video depictions of scenes from [well-known] books … According to the study, while the participants reported that the videos were “more engaging” than the audiobooks by about 15% on average, their physiological responses told a different story, with heart rates higher by about two beats a minute, and body temperatures raised by roughly two degrees when listening to audiobooks.”

“It is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like ‘With whom did you go?’ The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden.”

You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is about fighting the evils of censorship. After all, the back cover copy declares it to be a “classic novel of censorship and defiance” and it’s generally taught this way in high schools. But Bradbury himself never took this line. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the author declared that “Fahrenheit’s not about censorship. It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids. We’ve moved in to this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago.”