Category: words

Adam Bradley’s answer to the dorm-room question is nuanced but unequivocal, and boils down to this: Pop lyrics are not by themselves poetry, but pop songs can be. He does not fall into the trap of treating pop lyrics as technically equal to the heights scaled by great poetry; he understands that “song lyrics need music, voice, and performance to give them life.” He denies the need for “creating a canon of pop lyrics, so that Steven Tyler can sit with Shakespeare,” instead proposing a superb formulation: “Pop,” he writes, “is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all.”

“A great storyteller — whether a journalist or editor or filmmaker or curator — helps people figure out not only what matters in the world, but also why it matters. A great storyteller dances up the ladder of understanding, from information to knowledge to wisdom. Through symbol, metaphor, and association, the storyteller helps us interpret information, integrate it with our existing knowledge, and transmute that into wisdom.”

“For all outward appearances, the relationship between Amazon and the publishing industry had settled into a wary peace, following a highly publicized dust-up in 2014 between Amazon and Hachette, wherein Amazon tried to bully Hachette in negotiations over e-book prices. But tensions had been quietly ratcheting up since then. While some of Amazon’s advances against the publishing industry have gained headlines, many of its most damaging moves have received little coverage outside publishing trade publications.”

J.K. Rowling wrote the story – about Sirius Black and Harry Potter’s father, James – for a charity auction. “The manuscript was auctioned in 2008 to raise money for literacy causes, selling for 25,000 pounds, or about $32,100 at current exchange rates, according to the BBC. Police said that burglars had also taken jewels.”

“I have to give a convocation talk at Wesleyan, and so I’m working on The Talk—that’s what it’s called. I’m thinking, what do you say to these twenty-year-olds, these twenty-one-year-olds? What occurs to me is that it’s not about how powerful we are, it’s about how powerless we are. And in the face of the lack of power, what do we do then? What do we do then? That’s really the question. Are we willing to fail and fail in order to continue to say no to this? Because that’s what we should be doing.”

First of all, preschool. Then, a nanny. And finally: “We drag our weary carcasses to a coffee shop to acquire the strong espresso drinks that are all that stand between us and total creative defeat.”

Neuroscientists, doing what neuroscientists do, hooked up a group of poetry fans to a bunch of scanners and meters – including the “goosecam,” which looks for goosebumps – and had them listen to classic verse. All of them reported experiencing chills.

Ariel Dorfman, the erstwhile Chilean exile who wrote the play and film Death and the Maiden to illustrate the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship, turns not to Moby-Dick but rather to three of Melville’s novellas.

Write Magazine editor Hal Niedzviecki wrote that CanLit was “exhaustingly white and middle-class” because its producers are generally so and people tend to write what they know. “I say: Write what you don’t know. Get outside your own head. Relentlessly explore the lives of people who aren’t like you … Win the Appropriation Prize.” Some people were enraged, and the fallout was swift: WUC issued an apology, a board member resigned, TWUC’s Equity Task Force issued a list of demands – and Mr. Niedzviecki left his position.