Category: words

“You come up with an image, phrase or sentence. Your head snaps back, and you say to yourself, Where did that come from?! I’m not talking about automatic writing, though that may be part of it. I mean the entire range of invisible forces that produce and affect the work. There are things the writer sees that the reader does not; things the reader sees that the writer does not; and things neither of us ever sees. These, the most entrancing of the lot, have a power of their own. Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, they lead to unimagined, sometimes frightful yet fruitful destinations.”

That’s right, it’s not just a metaphor. “Library fauna such as bookworms, bedbugs and microbats have long been the subject of study. But a little-known subfield concentrates on the human biology of libraries.”

One way is “all rhyme and no reason,” mannered and polished, filled with self-revelation; the other is “so circumspect in … claims to self-knowledge that a reader grown used to the personal essay’s relentless flash of exposure might wonder what kind of shy, self-effacing creature produced [it].”

Solnit, who has written many things, including the extremely viral “Men Explain Things to Me,” says the time is ripe. “When I started [Solnit is 56], the essay was belles-lettres, decorative. Essays by women, particularly, tended to be treated as memoir even when they were not. Now they’re seen as powerful and compelling again. “

Hey, it’s the end of the summer, and people are traveling (if they’re not already back in school): “Whenever I’m visiting a new place, and particularly if I’m going to spend a good deal of time there, I like to find my way in with a book—either a book about the history of the area or one that’s simply set there, so that I can get a feel for its rhythms, the cadences and locations that will soon become familiar to me. That is, I’m looking for a kind of recognition. A reference point, if you will.”

“Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales. That’s not the heights of publishing’s heyday but it’s still harder to get than you’d think. Some publishers spend thousands of dollars on advertising and blogger outreach to get that number. Everyone’s looking for the next big thing and that costs a lot of cash. For the past 25 weeks, that big book in the YA world has been The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a searing politically charged drama about a young black girl who sees a police officer kill her friend, and the fallout it causes in her community.”

The initial offerings of Stanford’s Global Medieval Sourcebook “range from a 15th-century song translated from Middle French that bemoans a lost love … to five selections from Hong Mai’s 12th-century Yijian Zhi, a sprawling 420-chapter chronicle that is an invaluable record of society, spirituality, and culture of the Southern Song Dynasty. The GMS is, as suggested by its title, a globally focused resource, with plans for medieval texts translated from Arabic, Chinese, Old Spanish, Latin, Middle High German, Old English, and Old French.”

It’s a trick that’s been tried twice in recent days. First members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities spelled out “RESIST” with the first letter of each paragraph in their joint resignation letter. Then Daniel Kammen, formerly the science envoy at the State Department, resigned in a letter that contained the acrostic “IMPEACH.”

The shortage of smart, professional digital newsgathering in smaller American cities is a real problem with no immediate solution on the horizon; sadly, the number of eyeballs likely to land before a local story online isn’t enough to generate the income that would justify making it. In the longer term we probably can’t crowdfund our way out of that.

“The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: ‘The best writing, anywhere.’ It follows that the source of the best writing, anywhere, must also be the finest available authority on grammar, usage, and punctuation. But regular readers know that The New Yorker’s signature is not standard usage, but its opposite.”