“Scrabble has been a government-sanctioned sport in Nigeria since the 1990s. Tournaments get corporate sponsorship and offer big cash prizes. Results are reported in the media. When the 32-year-old [Wellington] Jighere captured the 2015 world championship in Perth, Australia, he received a congratulatory call from Nigeria’s president. … As a result, Nigeria boasts 23 players in the top 100 in the world rankings, compared to 18 for the United States, 13 for Australia, and 11 for England.”
Category: words
Why All The Writers Who Signed That Statement Against Trump Won’t Really Make A Difference
Alyssa Rosenberg observes that the statement is really a microcosm of literary culture’s long, fruitless struggle against mass-market television.
The ’80s Were Wonderful And The ’90s Ruined Everything, Says Dale Peck
“If the angst reached its zenith in the 1970s (Watergate, the fall of Saigon, gas lines, the hostage crisis), its nadir came in the 80s. Enervated by the tremors of punk and disillusioned by the failures of the Congressional class of ’74 and the impotence of the Carter presidency, America sighed a collective ‘What the fuck’ and decided to ring out the end of empire/end of days with the indulgence of third-century Romans.”
How William Faulkner Can Help Us Understand Trump Nation
“Abner, he was every stereotype of a poor white that has ever permeated the American story. … Faulkner doesn’t want us to laugh at Abner. He wants us to ask, what would it be like to be him? To feel as though destruction was your only path to dignity.”
Yes, Students, The English Lit Canon Is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, Heteronormative, Etc. – You Have To Read It Anyway
“The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. There is a clear line to Terrance Hayes (and Frank and Claire Underwood, and Lyon Dynasty) from Shakespeare. There is a direct path to Adrienne Rich (and Katniss Everdeen, and Lyra Belacqua) from Milton. (Rich basically says as much in Diving into the Wreck.) These guys are the heavies, the chord progressions upon which the rest of us continue to improvise, and we’d be somewhere else entirely without them.”
The End Of Theory: Time To Rethink How We Study Literature?
“From the Seventies to the present, English departments have been fascinated by theory after theory, including varieties of structuralism (Lacanian, Althusserian, Foucauldian, post-) and identity-political criticism (beginning with feminist critiques, then critical race theories, queer theories, and culminating, for now, in disability studies). Each of these theories is worthwhile on its own terms, but cumulatively they raise questions about the task of the English department: Should it really just be the analysis of texts through theoretical frameworks borrowed from philosophy, linguistics, political theory, history and so on?”
Restoring One Of The World’s Oldest Libraries
The Qarawiyyin Library in the Moroccan city of Fez is well over a thousand years old, and it’s about to reopen after a four-year renovation. “There were problems of infiltration, of sewage, degradation of walls, some cracks in different places in the library.” (includes audio)
How To Acknowledge Your Manuscript Will Never Be A Novel – And Move On
“That’s not to say that it hasn’t been fun. We got together in the summer of 2012. You were a short story, a few thousand glorious words, but I wanted you to be more. Every fiction writer thinks they need to be in a long-term relationship.”
Writers Will Steal Your Life And Use It For Their Books
“I was nonplussed by this awful reaction. I had borrowed certain traits, gestures, tricks of speech and various mannerisms from members of the family, but had fixed them on to characters with very different careers and past lives.”
In 2016, People Seem To Want More Books – And More Bookstores
Judy Blume “doesn’t have to write because, at 78, she has embarked on a new career: she’s an independent bookseller. Together with her husband, George Cooper, she has opened a small, nonprofit bookshop in Key West, Florida, where she’s working almost every day. And she’s loving it.”