Category: words

“The process of editing was so different as well, because when I’m writing my nonfiction books I’m quite open to it, but of course it’s very different when it’s a story that you’ve invented. When someone’s saying: “I’m not quite sure why”, you think: do I want to clarify that or is that telling me that I need to deepen the mystery around it?”

We want too much from poetry. We want it ” — to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or … to achieve universality by being irreducibly social,” and so much more. “The one thing all these demands share is they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems.”

“Perhaps you’ve experienced the feeling the French sociologist Roger Caillois called ‘ilinx’ – an elated disorientation caused by random acts of destruction, such as kicking over the office recycling bin. … Learning new words for emotions can also bring feelings to life. Discover the definition of a new emotion, and you’ll almost certainly find yourself re-organizing your inner world, seeing vague or amorphous sensations as concrete instances of a recognizable category of experience.”

“In the real world, the dawn of the written word incited the same kinds of anxieties that accompany any new technology that reorders people’s relationship with information. Socrates worried that writing would destroy human memory. And, indeed, the oral tradition was, across many cultures, upended by print. In the Victorian era, people were cautioned that reading fiction would make their minds atrophy. The telegraph, telephone, television, and internet, among other technologies, have all prompted similar concerns about how technology might destroy intellectual rigor.”

Thanks to instant messaging and the character limits of Twitter, the use of one of the most basic items of English grammar seems to be falling out of fashion. And when a period is used, especially in text messages and tweets, it can take on unfriendly overtones that may surprise older folks.

“Sharma’s Family Life, a mostly autobiographical novel that tells of how a family moves from Delhi to New York, where the older brother has an accident that leaves him brain-damaged and in need of 24-hour care, was named winner of the [€100,000] International DUBLIN Literary Award on Thursday.”

“Lisa McInerney, who started her career as a writer with a blog about life on a council estate in the ‘Arse End of Ireland’, has won the Baileys women’s prize for fiction with her debut novel” – The Glorious Heresies – “beating Man Booker winner Anne Enright [The Gathering] and bestseller Hanya Yanagihara [A Little Life] to the £30,000 award.”

“[There’s now a network of] public language-immersion schools where subjects are taught in Hawaiian until about fifth grade, at which point English is gradually introduced. Designed to revive the fading language, these institutions began spreading across the state three decades ago, resulting in what many consider the most successful revival of an indigenous language in North America.”

“What they do say is actually much weirder.”