Category: words

“Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region.”

“The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia’s cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and poor.”

“I think we’re at a really interesting place in literature. And probably in our cultural life, too. So we’ve had maybe thirty or forty years of reliable birth control in this country, right? And that has changed everything.”

“I’ve given up on childish fantasies of finding the One True Sword, or destroying the Ring of Power — those are myths. But video games are real. I’ve turned dollars into in-game gold, I’ve read the wikis, I’ve spent hundreds of hours grinding, I’ve abandoned work and family responsibilities, and I’ve ultimately quit in frustration.”

“Overseas publishers are going to make the financial gains in Australia. If Australian publishers are making less money, they’re going to go out of business. Publishers, editors, publicists, designers, sales people – the list of who works in a publishing company goes on forever. Their jobs are lost. And of course, Australian authors, booksellers and the printing industry are hugely affected.”

The problem with Wikipedia is not so much its reliability – which is, for most purposes, perfectly OK – as its increasing ubiquity as a source of information. “Wikipedia, despite being noncommercial, still poses many of the dangers of a traditional monopoly, and we run the risk of living in an information monoculture.”

“To the question of whether he had ever fought a duel, he replied drily that he had, but did not go into the details, and it was clear that such questions displeased him. We supposed that some unfortunate victim of his terrible skill lay on his conscience. However, it never entered our heads to suspect him of anything like cowardice. There are people whose appearance alone removes such suspicions. An unexpected incident amazed us all.”

“Our most persuasive medium for shifting opinion on climate change seem to be a certain kind of novel, and a certain kind of documentary film — specifically, the kind of doomsaying we find in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Truth is always stranger than fiction, but only fiction can frame life events as teachable moments.”

“We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane – and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. … On the other hand, we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

Among the goodies now on view: “Virginia Woolf’s manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway and an early travel notebook in which she begins to explore her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique; George Orwell’s notebook in which he lists ideas for what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, including ‘newspeak’, ‘doublethink’ and ‘two minutes of hate’; [and] a letter from TS Eliot declining to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”