Category: words

“The man is the true impersonation of his book – rough, uncouth, vulgar. … Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”

“On September 24, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made a brief visit to Berkeley, an event that drew police from around the region. That evening, a band of between 30 and 40 right-wing activists stormed Revolution Books. The attackers recorded the episode on video, rattling windows and confronting patrons. Since the initial incident, these activists have orchestrated at least five more visits to the store – posting their exploits in online videos.”

“Our half-century intermezzo has witnessed the dominance of television, the Internet, and mobile, as well as changing taste and business models. Consequently, only three [magazine] titles appear on both lists. If nothing else, the shifts between ’67 and ’17 demonstrate how most magazines follow a life cycle: often-difficult births, brash youthfulness, midlife success, and retirement at the back of the newsstand rack—or solely in the archives.”

“Two different hitters will generally talk the same game, but then one gets in and hits a homer and the other strikes out. (And that hitter is you, the writer, on different days, even.) So: an element of mystery has to pertain—which I really like…this idea of writing as more of a muscular, visceral act, in which the writer brings all that she is to that moment but can’t really explain what happens next.”

“To put books into English, the vulgar tongue, the language of the masses, was once radical. Teaching literature written in English is a recent innovation, historically speaking, and was long regarded in the more renowned institutions as a lowering of standards. It is still the case in some countries that the work of living writers is excluded from the curriculum, perhaps a sign of lingering prejudice against the vernacular, against what people say and think now, in the always disparaged present. In America this scruple is gone and forgotten. Writers not yet dead, in many cases only emerging, are read and pondered, usually under a rubric of some kind that makes them representative of gender or ethnicity or region, therefore instances of some perspective or trend often of greater interest to the professor than to any of the writers.”

It makes no sense, says novelist Tibor Fischer, and it hurts British writers. “British writers aren’t eligible for the big American awards. The stipulation that American writers have to be published in the UK doesn’t help much as, by definition, the strongest and most successful American authors are the ones that cross over.”

Lidia Yuknavitch: “If he had not whispered into my ear the words that he did the first time I met him, ‘I know what happened to you. Death’s a motherfucker,’ bonding us in a single second with two dead children between us, my beautiful tiny girl infant and his beautifully strong wrestler son, second selves, hovering between our bodies, I don’t know if I would have trusted anyone or anything in the world again.”

The author of Never Use Future says that we have to change the conversation. “People know not to use Comic Sans and maybe Papyrus ― those are things you just shouldn’t do. But very rarely do people understand why they should use a typeface.”

Nick Kristof runs a contest, and here’s part of one response:
“I’ve told myself my voice alone
Won’t make a difference, but that I
Should not interpret that: Don’t try.”

“Initially, 37 per cent of my 30 students – undergraduates at Boston University – were angry or annoyed about this experiment. While my previous policy leveraged public humiliation, it didn’t dictate what they did with their phones in class. For some, putting their phones into cases seemed akin to caging a pet, a clear denial of freedom. Yet by the end of the semester, only 14 per cent felt negatively about the pouches; 11 per cent were ‘pleasantly surprised’; 7 per cent were ‘relieved’; and 21 per cent felt ‘fine’ about them.”