Category: words

“Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. … But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity?”

“In a blog post on Monday, Oyster’s founders said they were ‘taking steps to sunset’ the company’s service, which launched in 2012. ‘We believe more than ever that the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade,’ they wrote. ‘Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for e-books.’ Those opportunities may happen at Google.”

From Humpty Dumpty’s explication de texte of “Jabberwocky” to the endless loops of comment on everything from rap lyrics to campaign speeches at Genius.com, Evan Kindly leads us down the (annotated) rabbit hole.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

“Two and a half years ago, the critic and editor John Freeman abruptly resigned his post as editor in chief of Granta, the tweedy British literary magazine that he’d spent several years remaking for a 21st-century readership. … Finally, last summer, Freeman announced the more long-term venture everyone was waiting for: Freeman’s, a Granta-like literary magazine-meets-anthology that he would publish regularly in partnership with Grove Atlantic.” The first issue arrives next week.

“Eight titles have been put together for the [six-week] promotion, each showcasing extracts from two Dahl books, including Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Families, with tasters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox, and Roald Dahl’s Magical Mischief, extracting George’s Marvellous Medicine and Matilda.”

The fact that there is a specific author and editor, and that the SEP has become so important to philosophy, helps make all of this easier. Any errors reflect poorly on the contributors, and someone who spots a slip-up can talk to a real person about it—neither of which is true with Wikipedia. And if an author is slow or unwilling to respond, the editorial board will transfer his or her responsibilities to a brisker philosopher.

Laura Miller: “Much of a writer’s rep emerges informally, in the conversations that writers, readers, and critics have amongst themselves. Whether another writer is spoken of respectfully, whether you get the impression that ‘everyone’ is reading his or her new book enthusiastically, or how well people think he or she comes across in interviews – these and a dozen other imponderable factors constitute a reputation during a writer’s lifetime, particularly in the early part of a career. This stuff – let’s call it litchat – may be ephemeral, but it absolutely shapes the formal reception of a writer’s work.”

In an essay to make a reader pound the table in either relieved agreement (“Finally someone said it!”) or incredulous vexation, Roxana Robinson argues that the book “lacks a crucial component of great fiction: compassion. … The only real emotion in Lolita derives from Nabokov’s embitterment, and its expression lies in his interior laughter.”