Category: words

“This notion of language as a cultural virus is interesting and provocative. And quite possibly true. Certainly, in the vicinity of a modern human mind, language has this character. Language doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like arms or breasts or hair. Those whose access to language is blocked—for example, deaf children who are surrounded by people who speak but don’t sign—usually grow up with little or no language. But when these same children spend their days with others like themselves, the smallest spark of signed language flares and catches through the group as if through dry grassland. Or, if you will, like the measles.”

“Here there is no question of a certain person making certain mistakes in certain circumstances. Here we have an across-the-board dismissal of the very idea of progress or improvement, or engineered happiness. So why do we, or some of us, read such material, and read it with appetite?” Tim Parks has an answer.

“If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it’s easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.”

Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz’s experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: “Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”

“A cognitive scientist looking at [scholar Stephen] Booth’s explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming – when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation – the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing – how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. (Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)”

Talk about unlikely places! “Written at the start of Plath and [Ted] Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain.”

“‘We are living in the most terrible age,’ Tóibín told the Hay literary festival in Wales. ‘I know people are worried about Brexit and I know people worry about Donald Trump. But I worry about the flashback.'”

Hey, good news: Novelist Emma Straub’s “Books Are Magic is opening in the midst of a renaissance for independent booksellers. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,775 members around the country in 2016, up from 1,410 in 2010.” (Now here’s what to buy from them.)

In Chicago’s new American Writers Museum: “If the idea is to curate — to present to the world, in some official capacity, the Most Important People in American Literary History — then the battle is unwinnable. There’s no way we’re all ever going to agree. We see certain writers as canonical because we were always told they were canonical.”