Category: words

“A physical book is like eating a great meal in a beautiful restaurant with a fantastic view; an e-book is like eating that same meal from a takeout box on your lap in a basement.”

“I suggested that the demands of history and fiction are slightly different – that since a novel is a story, it must be complete, and since a history must be accepted by the reader as accurate, it must be incomplete. He was not convinced.”

“This was a unanimous decision by all three judges on the panel, giving yet another complete victory to Google saying that its book scanning project is fair use — and, as an appeals court ruling, is useful in creating precedent in the all important 2nd Circuit (with some pretty damn good quotes for future cases). This is a big and clear win for fair use.”

“I watched slack-jawed in horror as they threw one of the 20th century’s most iconic fictional heroes, Atticus Finch, under the bus.” (audio with transcript)

“The disappearance of nudity from Playboy says more about the persistence of ticklish attitudes about nudity than it does about Playboy. Insofar as Hugh Hefner was somewhat correct to view himself as an agent of sexual liberation, this development resembles a kind of planned obsolescence. The Playboy nude was a stage to be passed through, like puberty or, in Marx’s theory of history, capitalism.”

Ed Park takes a look at a new series of fiction in translation – “in all its strangeness and variety, from the nineteen-thirties to the present” – from Dalkey Archive Press.

The tale of how Flannery O’Connor’s purloined letters – purloined by one David Breithaupt from the Kenyon College library – were pinched and fenced is an example of just how easy it can be for us to lose crucial pieces of the historical record.

“In the late 1990s, you couldn’t hunt for a snack in an American home without coming across a magnetic poem or two. But in the decades since the product first stuck itself to the collective consciousness, fridges nationwide have slowly begun shedding their words. The history of the form itself, though, goes back much farther than Kapell’s sneeze – and the increasingly digital future will likely only widen its reach.”

“Among the books that have survived the second round of cuts, a few clear favorites are beginning to emerge – while others have been displaced by less familiar names.”

Elvish, Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki – they’re all “conlangs” (constructed languages), and there are many, many more. “The story of conlanging is, as with so many other bodies of knowledge, the story of old-fashioned research inflated to surreal proportions by the internet’s bellows. Yes, you can be a professional conlanger, but the competition is stiff.”