Category: words

Says the citation for Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers, “The judges felt that there are parts in the book where Bollen goes overboard in his attempts to describe the familiar in new terms, leading occasionally to confusion. In the line quoted … they were left unsure as to how many testicles the character in question has.”

“The first time around, many paywalls simply did not work. But times have changed. The New York Times success in transforming itself into a company that is markedly less dependent on advertising than it has been in recent years has emboldened many other publishers. The Times now makes more than 20 percent of its revenue on digital-only subscriptions, a number which has been growing quickly. In absolute terms, last quarter, the Times made $85.7 million from these digital products. The question is: Can media organizations that are not huge like the Times or The Washington Post, or business focused like Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal, create meaningful businesses from their paywalls?”

The good reader’s cultural elevation always relied on his oppositional relationship to the curiously undifferentiated mass of bad readers, who struck Nabokov—and have struck many teachers and literary scholars since—as a kind of irritating background noise; always already present and unworthy of any serious or systematic consideration.

“Why was I writing? It was not for glory; I had seen what I took to be real glory. It was not for acclaim. I knew that if the book was published, it would have to be under a pseudonym; I did not want to jeopardize a career by becoming known as a writer. I had heard the derisive references to “God-Is-My-Copilot” Scott. The ethic of fighter squadrons was drink and daring; anything else was suspect. Still, I thought of myself as more than just a pilot and imagined a book that would be in every way admirable.”

BBC World Service’s In the Studio visits the California poet laureate and former NEA chairman at his hilltop retreat, where he talks about how he feels a poem coming on physically and has to walk around as he’s composing it – as well as the origin of the ballad he wrote about the death of his Mexican-American cowboy grandfather in Wyoming. (audio)

“It is unsurprising that simplified English is the lingua franca of Moria prison camp and its environs, spoken between asylum-seekers from formerly-colonised states as disparate as Iraq, Uganda, Pakistan and Burma. But in the crucible of the overcrowded detention centre … English is undergoing an accelerated evolution, tentatively beginning to develop its own unique grammar and idiom.”

“New stats revealed this week by audiobooks.com showed how many (or few) of us get to the end of a range of audiobooks. They make tough reading for Craig Oliver, whose No 10 [Downing St] Brexit memoirs, Unleashing Demons, kept only 20% of readers rapt until the end. The oft-unfinished War and Peace retained about the same proportion through its 60-plus hours of narration (stats were not available for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time).”

Ben Judah: “There is a simplicity and a clarity to Orwell’s prose. It flows nicely. But there is also nothing special about it other than the fact it has been canonised as the ultimate in English authorial excellence. This is still very much a surprise to me, because there is just so much wrong with it.”

“Away from caliphate building and sectarianism, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East, allowing artists and writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate. Jonathan [Guyer] meets the writers who are latching onto the adventure, despair and paranoia prevalent in genre fiction to tell stories that transcend the present.” (audio)

Says Frank Brinkley of the booby prize’s sponsor, The Literary Review, “Maybe we are having an effect – definitely literary fiction’s changing and the ‘Oh sod it, I’ll put in a sex scene’ attitude that prompted the creation of the award has pretty much fallen by the wayside.”