Category: words

The ongoing dispute over where and how the gospels should be kept, and who may see them, is intensely local yet symbolic. It revolves around the age-old traditions of an isolated monastery, but it exemplifies the scepticism sometimes aroused by Western heritage programmes. It encapsulates the rival claims of sacred rites and secular scholarship, raising questions about the aim of preservation and the ultimate ownership of a nation’s culture.

Google tells me that between 2000 and 2010, could revolutionize appeared on indexable websites fewer than fourteen thousand times. Since then, it’s seen what venture capitalists might call hockey-stick growth, increasing from six thousand instances in 2011 to thirteen thousand in 2014 to thirty thousand in 2017. Four months into 2018, could revolutionize has appeared on the internet nearly twenty thousand times. It’s possible that the sharp spike in popularity of could revolutionize mirrors Silicon Valley’s ascension in our collective consciousness. But which is the chicken, and which is the egg?

After the five teenagers spray-painted swastikas and graffiti on a 19th-century schoolhouse for black children, a judge ordered them to read books from a list that included (among others) Elie Wiesel’s Night, 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Did the sentence have the hoped-for effect?

Emily Nemens, 34, comes from Baton Rouge, where she has been a co-editor of The Southern Review for five years. Shew replaces Lorin Stein, who resigned in December following a board investigation into his sexual relationships with magazine staffers.

Linguist John McWhorter explains the reasons (such as our language’s mongrel origins) in this Lexicon Valley podcast.

“The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedly they want to nail women.” Katy Waldman calls out “the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility. No one is fooled. “

Few writers come close to possessing the power and influence advice-givers wield. They literally tell people what to do! And people listen! Even though they often aren’t licensed to be giving advice; frequently their only qualifications are their imperviousness to embarrassment and their penchant for popularity.

Tim Parks: “Every few days, working on my new novel, my thoughts flash back to something Colm Tóibín said at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival nine months ago: that flashbacks are infuriating. Speaking at an event to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, Tóibín said Austen was marvelous because she was able to convey character and plot in the most satisfying way without the ‘clumsiness’ of the flashback. Today, on the other hand, we have to hear how a character’s parents and even grandparents met and married. Writers skip back and forth in time filling in the gaps in their shaky stories. It is dull and incompetent. Is Tóibín right? I worry, as I prepare to put together a flashback myself. Is there no merit or sense in the device? Didn’t Joyce use it? And Faulkner? Or David Lodge, for that matter? Or John Updike?”

“Mainly, this is because I’m afraid of excesses – mine and others’. Sometimes people make fun of me. They say: ‘You want a world without outbursts of joy, suffering, anger, hatred?’ Yes, I want precisely that, I answer. … But as the world isn’t going in that direction, I make an effort, at least in the artificial universe that is delineated by writing, never to exaggerate with an exclamation mark.”

According to Sir Brian Vickers, a major reason he has not yet found a home for his complete edition of works by Thomas Kyd is that his “reputation as a scholar has been damaged by a string of hostile reviews by people associated with the New Oxford Shakespeare”.