Category: words

Lam Wing-Kee, one of five booksellers who vanished from Hong Kong last year and turned up in the People’s Republic confessing to “mistakes” on TV, says mainland agents are tailing him “without restraint” and has requested protection from Hong Kong police.

“Their method is straightforward. The idea behind sentiment analysis is that words have a positive or negative emotional impact. So words can be a measure of the emotional valence of the text and how it changes from moment to moment. So measuring the shape of the story arc is simply a question of assessing the emotional polarity of a story at each instant and how it changes.”

“The legacy of Federico García Lorca’s hostilities with government lives on these days through his family, whose members are tangling with officials over control of a new $25 million center built to honor García Lorca, the playwright and poet who was executed by firing squad during the Spanish Civil War.”

“Cheryl Strayed is really interesting. She’s very sure of herself, confident, a very healthy enlightened person. I am much more of a wreck that she is. I think both have a lot of wisdom to share, but her style is different because I think she’s had her shit together for much longer than I have, frankly. For example, I wouldn’t dream of camping alone under any circumstances. I’m a chickenshit. Our biology is different. I would not walk that far. Without Cheetos.”

“We have to be persistent even with little resources because there are so many stories to tell and no one else to tell them.”

Chris Power: “It is an irony of Beckett’s posthumous reputation that his plays are now far better known than his prose, although he considered the latter his primary focus. … I suspect the real problem with Beckett’s short fiction is its difficulty, and that his greatest achievements in the form do not comply with what some gatekeepers suppose to be the genre’s defining traits.”

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this title was held by the Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York City, which covered 154,250ft². Unfortunately, the 5th Avenue flagship store closed down in 2014.

“It mattered – a lot – who the interviewers were and who was editing the text they produced.” The testimonies collected by the relatively small number of black interviewers read very differently from the tales told to visiting whites – some of whom came from slaveholding families.

“The sheer proliferation of advertising demanded that Shawn scramble in search of more and more editorial matter. This, he found, had an inevitable drag on quality. There is, in this world, after all, only so much talent at a given time—only so much good writing. At a certain point, he found it necessary to limit the pages in a weekly issue to 248—as fat as a phone book in some towns. In his tenure as editor, Shawn made innumerable hires, tried out countless freelancers, and ran long, multipart series—some forgettable, some central to the literary and journalistic history of mid-century America.”