Category: words

Robert McCrum: “Literary classics cluster on the north face of Parnassus. For this vertiginous terrain there are different sherpas. Italo Calvino says that a classic is ‘a book that has never finished what it wants to say’. Ezra Pound identifies ‘a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness’ … Alan Bennett wryly notes: ‘Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.'” (includes lame reason for including drama, poetry, and religious scripture)

“Each award was endowed by visual artists like Ellsworth Kelly and his partner, Jack Shear, as well as the foundations of Cy Twombly and Roy Lichtenstein.” The first round of winners are Lisa Robertson, Anne Boyer, and Fred Moten.

Helen Garner, after James Wood praised her in The New Yorker: “I used to have all sorts of secret, spiteful feelings because I never won any prizes in Australia for my non-fiction. I put a lot of energy into acting like I didn’t care. I did, quite a lot. It has literary value and I have worked on it as hard as any fiction I’ve written. So I felt deeply gratified and relieved of enormous amounts of anxiety and mortification.”

The comics Amar Chitra Katha (or The Immortal Stories) got started when a newspaper executive watched a quiz show where kids knew little to nothing about the Hindu epic The Ramayana. Now ACK has been a kids’ entertainment empire for decades – but it’s an empire built on bigotry: “ACK’s writing and illustrative team constructed a legendary past for India by tying masculinity, Hinduism, fair skin, and high caste to authority, excellence, and virtue. On top of that, [the] comics often erased non-Hindu subjects from India’s historic and religious fabric.”

A bookstore is many things that Amazon’s Kindle store is not: “‘a miniature city,’ a centre of resistance and a battlefield where commercial value and authorial prestige are contested every day. It’s ‘a condensed version of the world,’ and a ritual space for ‘a community of believers.'” Does anyone believe in the bookstore anymore?

Phyllis Wheatley was abducted from the West African coast and sold to a Boston couple at roughly age seven. Their daughter taught the young slave to read, and within two years, Phyllis fluently read and wrote English and started learning Latin. When she was 18, her owners took her to London to publish a book of her poems, and – once disbelieving publishers and others were convinced that Phyllis had written them herself – she became famous on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thanks to Milo’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against Simon & Schuster for withdrawing publication of his book Dangerous, the draft manuscript with comments by editor Mitchell Ivers is now public record. So the Internet is having a high old time with it, and you can join in. (Our personal favorite note: “Beauty regime moved to box at end of chapter, after Nietzsche section.”)

“From the get-go, the project was a behemoth. The Library of Congress was essentially vacuuming up every tweet, archiving it, and attempting to turn it into a public searchable destination. In 2013, the data already represented hundreds of terabytes. Even back then, creating this archive was an immense task, and as Twitter has grown and changed, it became more and more unfeasible. According to the U.S.’s oldest federal cultural institution, the decision to not archive every tweet was brought on by the platform’s growing volume.”