Category: words

Last fall it was over Immanuel Kant. This time it was the superiority (or not) of poetry over prose. (Was vodka involved? Need you ask?)

“If we are what we read, then Americans are wimpy, religious, ambitious, self-improving, and patriotic. The specific possibility that the only book any adult read last year was one of the best-selling books on the Nielsen or Amazon list is perhaps more disheartening than the shapeless fact that three-quarters of the American population read only one book. “

De Botton thinks news should be more like novels, but what does he think news is? “The determined pursuit of the anomalous,” he writes at one point, before deciding that he wants to leave the definition “deliberately vague”.

Poets are being used to sell things. Poets are celebrity endorsers whose endorsements seem to mean something.

You “could take [the commas out of] a great deal of modern American texts and you would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all.”

Yiu Mantin (Yao Wentian in Mandarin) was arrested three months ago on charges of smuggling chemicals into mainland China, but his family maintains he is being held because he was about to issue a book very critical of President Xi Jinping.

Filer, a mental health nurse, takes the £30,000 prize for his the first novel, narrated by an English boy who recounts his descent into schizophrenia following his younger brother’s death.

“It’s straight out of the pages of science fiction: a ‘wearable’ book, which uses temperature controls and lighting to mimic the experiences of a story’s protagonist, has been dreamed up by academics at MIT.” (includes video)

“The new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, produced by a team of 30 scholars and available partly on an open-access basis, presents the texts of all his plays, masques, poems, letters and criticism in an interactive digital format, along with hundreds of supporting documents and musical scores and a bibliography.”

“In a way, there’s no such thing. It may take three words, or an entire sentence, or even an interpolated paragraph, but any word can be translated. Short of swelling a book into an encyclopedia, however, there is no way of dealing with the larger problem: untranslatable worlds.”