“The Swedish Academy … announc[ed] Friday that the prize will not be handed out this year, on the grounds that the academy is in no shape to pick a winner after a string of sex abuse allegations and financial crimes scandals … and it was decided that two winners will be announced in 2019, with one recipient recognized for this year’s eligibility period.”
Category: words
Appreciating Poetry Requires Acts Of Archaeology
The critic must reconcile history and poetry. A poem is a product of its time just as much—if the poem’s any good—as a triumph over its time. Many poems are so familiar we have forgotten how to read them. We see the words but we paper over the cracks in our understanding. Criticism should try to see poems from the inside, to get down into the muck of the poem’s invention—and of course into the muck of its language.
‘Ink-Stained Pixels’: The (Surprisingly Long) History Of E-Books Before Kindle
“The truth is that it took a long time for e-books to ‘arrive’; Amazon was far from first. There, admittedly, was a comfort level that had to be worked out with the electronic book, which gave Amazon the perfect opportunity to swoop in. Tonight’s Tedium talks about the evolution of electronic books before the Kindle. I’d tell you to turn the page, but we’re not really working with paper here, are we?”
The Nobel Prize For Literature May Be Cancelled This Year
Yes, the fallout from the sexual harassment scandal has gotten that bad: “The Swedish Academy yesterday discussed the Nobel prize and came to no decision,” said the head of the panel last week. “After our next Thursday meeting there will most probably be a statement on whether we will award a prize this year or reserve it for next year, in which case two prizes for literature will be announced in October 2019.”
Why I Turned Marx’s Communist Manifesto Into A Graphic Novel
Martin Rowson: “After I graduated I sold a cartoon series to New Statesman titled ‘Scenes from the Lives of the Great Socialists’, based on hideously contrived puns on the defining dicta of Marxism. … I had unfinished business with Marx, and occasionally images would flash into the back of my mind of great geological slabs of History grinding against massive clumps of the Dialectic. Then SelfMadeHero asked if I fancied adapting The Communist Manifesto as a comic book for Marx’s 200th birthday. The whole thing came instantly into my head.”
It Costs An Awful Lot To Change A Country’s Alphabet – Just Ask Kazakhstan
The Kazakh language has used a modified version of the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet since the early Soviet days. Now the government of the Central Asian republic has adopted a plan to switch entirely to the Latin alphabet by 2025 – with a budget of more than $660 million.
Read Excerpts From Zora Neale Hurston’s Interviews With The Last Slave To Survive The Middle Passage
Hurston trained as a cultural anthropologist, and Barracoon, which languished in her archives for decades and is only now being published, is the result of months of interviews with Cudjo Lewis, who was kidnapped in what is now Benin and brought to Alabama in 1860.
How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible
The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.
Saturday Was Independent Bookstore Day, But Then, So Is Every Day If You Care About Books
Writer Celeste Ng explains the Gen X bookstore experience, including those joys of the mall: “I grew up haunting the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the mall. So my first indies—the long-gone Booksellers in Beachwood, Ohio and the redoubtable Mac’s Backs in Cleveland Heights—were revelations; they carried such a wide array of books, including niche titles that a more mainstream retailer wouldn’t have. I discovered many of my favorite authors just by browsing their shelves.”
You Think You’re Waiting A Long Time To Publish? This Zora Neale Hurston Book Took Ninety Years To Get To Print
She first tried to publish the novel in 1931, but its genesis was earlier. “Hurston began researching Barracoon in 1927, when she first interviewed the former slave Kossola (later named Cudjo Lewis) on an assignment from the famed anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas.”