Category: words

“Tokyo-based designer Kosuke Takahashi has redesigned the tactile script to make it readable for both visually impaired and sighted individuals. His new typeface, Braille Neue, updates the nearly 200 century-old system by superimposing its raised dots onto carefully configured letterforms, allowing it to be understood by both sight and touch.”

“Newish LA Weekly editor Darrick Rainey and publisher Brian Calle run what is perhaps the most on-edge paper at this moment in American journalism. In December of last year, Calle – formerly the head of the libertarian op-ed pages for the Orange County Register – and a group of investors under the name Semanal Media bought the august alt-weekly, then axed 9 of 13 staff writers and editors … The layoffs prompted a furious counterattack by former staffers and freelancers, who alleged Calle heads a conservative conspiracy to turn the historically progressive LA Weekly into an alt-right rag.”

“The priceless tome was brought to an Alençon (Orne, Normandy) auctioneer specialising in the sale of religious objects, by an anonymous owner several months ago. It was discovered to have been a collection of texts written in the scriptorium of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey, and includes Latin writing from Saint-Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, the founder of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey; as well as poems, geographical notes, and music scores.” The government, which argues that it is the rightful owner of the manuscript, is trying to halt the sale.

If the Pulitzer people had only bitten the bullet and done the equivalent of what the Nobel committee did for Bob Dylan and rock lyrics when they said, “You know what? We’re going to get dissed and ridiculed for even putting Dylan on the same level as John Steinbeck, but what the heck. Let’s just do it and take the flak.” Who knows what the dividend would have been for wider society?

Writing, like anything – from athletics to nuclear physics – depends on a basic degree of talent, which can be cultivated through training. So let’s stop pretending that devoting a year or two to studying writing in the company of others is anything other than a valid step towards a literary career.

In a groundbreaking study of more than two million books published in North America between 2002 and 2012, scholars found that books by women authors are priced 45% less than those of their male counterparts. The researchers, sociologist Dana Beth Weinberg and mathematician Adam Kapelner, both from Queens College-CUNY, say there is a lot more to the story than can be gleaned from this price gap alone.

But writers, says novelist and essayist Alexander Chee, must write to fight back. “If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving.”

Wow: “There was poetic justice of a sort in the auction of the poets’ belongings by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, at Bonhams in London in March. Ms. Plath’s lots, which included clothes, jewelry and childhood drawings, outsold Mr. Hughes’s mostly literary remnants (which is to say, books) twice over and then some, earning $551,862.” (Yes, this piece is about money – but also about who Plath was.)

Here’s the deal: “We owe translators, and perhaps also ourselves, some recognition of what it might have meant to have handled every single word (space and punctuation mark) of the writing-to-be-translated, to have taken a decision in relation to its every single word (space and punctuation mark), and indeed to have written every single one of its parts.”

Eliot, whose non-pen-name was Mary Ann Evans, lived for decades with her partner, whose open marriage meant that when his wife had a baby with a different man, he was fine with it (and supported the baby). “Lewes’s legal wife went on to have three more children with her lover, all of whom Evans and Lewes supported (along with Lewes’s three sons) through their writing, editing and translating. Their urgent need for money was partly what prompted Lewes to encourage Evans to try her hand at writing fiction at the age of 37.” How does that life experience turn into Dorothea’s terrible mistake with Casaubon? Read on.