Category: words

“The ‘convent exposé’ [was] a book, fictional or not, that purported to reveal the sin and salaciousness hidden behind the walls of religious institutions. In these books, sisters are kept captive, denied medical care, and sometimes raped or otherwise subject to sexual depravities. … These books, mostly forgotten today, were some of the most popular publications of their time.” (One was outsold onely by Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)

“In addition to being among the greatest Italian literary works, Divine Comedy also heralded a craze for ‘infernal cartography,’ or mapping the Hell that Dante had created. … There are several theories for why it was so important then to delineate Dante’s Hell, including the general popularity of cartography at the time and the Renaissance obsession with proportions and measurements. However, given the inherent limitations of mapping a fictional world, there was some debate between scholars over the specifics.”

“We take Wikipedia for granted these days, but the encyclopedia on disc was a big deal – especially because it was both cheaper and smaller than the alternative. Today’s Tedium dives into the history of the electronic encyclopedia. Eat your heart out, Encarta.”

“The nub of the disagreement here boils down to what exactly linguistics says about the world, and the appropriate archetypes we should apply to make it effective. So just what kinds of questions does linguistics want to answer? What counts as evidence? Is universal grammar in particular – and theoretical linguistics in general – a science at all?”

What happened to reading Rebecca West? Her 1941 nonfiction “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” was often listen as a top nonfiction book of the 20th century … and then somehow the book, “an attack on empire, a defense of small nations, and an embrace of concrete delights over abstract causes,” passed its 75th anniversary with nary a notice, even from the International Rebecca West Society.

Publishers started courting him, hard, as soon as he was fired by the current president, and especially after he leaked some memos. “Comey was reluctant at first to entertain offers, but he later decided that he had something to say beyond a rehashing of his career highlights and low points, according to his agent.”

At least, it’s hard in the United States. In France, no such problem. “If you sit for many hours and look down at a book and then up at a city and then down at the book again, eventually the two blend into one, and there is no longer any difference between them. This is how the collapse between literature and life happens.”

Perhaps you missed this, but “in her expansive set of prequels, concurrent fictions and sequels, published between 1984 and 2000, she is particularly adept at picking out the characters one would wonder about most, and writes them so well as almost to make Austen seem remiss for telling us only one side of the story.”

Whoops: “What ticked Christie off the most, quite understandably, was a comment from theatre producer Bertie Meyer, who decided to tell the author, after seeing her recent publicity shot, that, ‘Frankly, Agatha, that photo makes you look about 70.'”

And add this total horse hooey to the pile of conveniently told canards: “Dramatic new flourishes to the story continue to pop up, too. The Telegraph recently referred to Austen ‘stuffing her scrawled pages into her dress whenever someone entered the room’ — a detail straight out of Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel, ‘Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,’ published in 1740-41. Imagining Austen shoving papers into a flimsy Regency frock in front of a parlor window may well be your idea of a good time. If so, enjoy the imaginary peep show, but don’t call it history.”