Category: words

Don Katz: “While performances are being elevated and attuned to this advanced listening experience, why not write to the form in an original way? So it’s not just book authors. TV writers, movie writers, others are flocking in to help us get to the next stage. Which is: What is the, from the ground up, creativity that is right for this emergent private listening aesthetic?”

“Electronic books cannot benefit from the same reduced rate of value-added tax as paper books, the top court of the European Union ruled … the court argued that a reduced rate can apply only to physical books and that even though e-books can be read on tablets and computers, they should be considered ‘electronically supplied services,’ not goods.”

The federal judiciary plan “would pare back the word-count limit from 14,000 to a svelte 12,500. The idea has gotten a thumbs-down verdict from some lawyers … but it won cheers from dozens of bleary-eyed appellate judges.” (Mind you, for the attorneys, it’s not just about billable hours.)

“His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements, but his vision, sometimes explicit and more often artistically indirect, is at bottom a gentlemanly, non-millenarian one … Humans, to him, are just another type of ‘fauna,’ a word that Vargas Llosa went on to use in novel after novel, not with detachment or revulsion but, rather, with a sort of zookeeper’s tenderness for his charges.”

“Writers have to write now for a world where readers are busy, on the move and have little time for contemplation and reflection. The writer has to focus on writing better, cutting to the chase and doing more of the readers’ contemplative work for them.”

“With Weldon’s words in mind, we decided to bowdlerize some famously difficult blocks of text” – from Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, James, and Woolf – “to get them ready for the busy Kindle reader, in order to examine exactly how new system this might work.”

“The rise of corporate capitalism, and the astonishing, almost exponential rate of its recent acceleration, I would argue, present a huge challenge to the writer, forcing him or her to rethink their whole role and function, to remap their entire universe.”

“These days, a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn’t all have been created by people bent over their laptops.”

It is a library like no other in Europe—in its cross-disciplinary reference, its peculiarities, its originality, its strange depths and unexpected shallows. Magic and science, evil eyes and saints’ lives: these things repose side by side in a labyrinth of imagery and icons and memory. Dan Brown’s hero Robert Langdon supposedly teaches “symbology” at Harvard. There is no such field, but if there were, and if Professor Langdon wanted to study it before making love to mysterious Frenchwomen and nimbly avoiding Opus Dei hit men, this is where he would come to study.

“Real teenage diaries are becoming a form of public entertainment – often self-deprecating – in a number of places, as brave souls divulge details of unsatisfied crushes and lost friendships. Ruminations that now seem ridiculous had once seemed profound to those who had written them down.”