AbeBooks highlights great books written by great librarians.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Are E-Readers and Poetry Incompatible?
That's the question posed, recently, by the Washington Post.
From the story...
Form is essential to the art, Miller says. Line breaks, stanza breaks and pacing — that’s the poetry; otherwise it’s just words. And form, he says, is precisely what gets lost when poems get converted to e-readers, which is why Miller doesn’t publish on e-readers. He says they don’t honor his work.
That’s a widespread feeling among his fellow poets and a debate that can pit poetry purists against futurists. “The technology has to get it right,” says Miller. Or poets won’t use it.
“Right now, we’re talking about conversion of print files to digital files and the greatest issue is in the poetry community,” says Ira Silverberg, director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. “If you’re working on a Kindle or Nook or Kobo device, and you shoot up a page, you lose the line breaks depending on how you’ve formatted your preferences.”
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The Novel Resurgence of the Independent Bookstore
The Christian Science Monitor monitors the indie bookstore's rising from the dead.
From the piece...
A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.
While beloved bookstores still close down every year, sales at independent bookstores overall are rising, established independents are expanding, and new ones are popping up from Brooklyn to Big Stone Gap, Va. Bookstore owners credit the modest increases to everything from the shuttering of Borders to the rise of the "buy local" movement to a get-'er-done outlook among the indies that would shame Larry the Cable Guy. If they have to sell cheesecake or run a summer camp to survive, add it to the to-do list.
"2012 was the year of the bookstore," says Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir "The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap." In her memoir, she recounts how she and her husband, Jack Beck, created – sometimes despite themselves – a successful used-book store in a town that, by any business measure, is too small to support one.
"Jack and I will never be rich. But we found a place where people said there wasn't a market and we said 'yes there was,' " says Ms. Welch. "We feel like it's important for bookslingers to hang together – we'll hang together or we'll hang separately.... And we're holding the line."
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
The Joy of the Joy of Cooking
Book Patrol takes a look at one of the most important cookbooks in history.
From the piece...
It is the most popular and best-selling cookbook in American history, with nearly 18 million copies sold.
It is the only cookbook to be included in the New York Public Library’s list of 150 Influential Books of the Century.
The
original edition was privately published by the author in an edition of
3000 copies and was illustrated by the author’s daughter, Marion
Rombauer Becker, who also designed the spectacular dust jacket featuring
St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, taking up a mop to
fend off the dragon Tarasque.
But the real joy came when Bobbs-Merrill took over the commercial publication of the book in 1936.
The rest they say is history.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Not Enough - An Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Poetry Foundation sits down with him.
From the piece...
Caples: I’ve got another question; you have a passage about Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash: “the popular poets of America…” I feel this is a line you’ve been pushing a bit, that there’s a lot of lost musicality in a lot of contemporary poetry. But it seems like an unfair comparison. I mean, poets are poets and songwriters are songwriters, you know? What’s the point of comparing poets to folk musicians, ultimately? They’re two different…
The folk musicians are the real poets, the real popular poets of America. The poets that are printed in books, how many people read them compared to the vast audience of the folksinger? A lot of the folksingers’ poems are greater than the printed poems! Dylan’s early songs were long surrealist poems. They were wonderful poems on their own. You could say the same of some of the Woody Guthrie lines… The printing press made poetry so silent. Before the printing press, poets spoke and sang aloud! They didn’t depend on the book. The Beats were the first poets since Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay to make performance aloud more important than the printed version. The oral message came first.
Caples: But still at the same time it seems like there are folksingers and there are poets. Poets aren’t folksingers, so why hold them to the standard of a folksinger in that sense? Of course, a folksinger is going to be more popular than a poet.
Why not hold them to the same standards as folksingers? Or do you want to keep them forever in their cubbyholes?
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Is Masculine Writing Dead?
Novelist Frank Bill looks around a bookstore and finds
very few writers that capture his life of deer hunting, physical labor,
and ruggedness.
From a piece on the Daily Beast...
From a piece on the Daily Beast...
What I’m saying is, a large number
of men have lost their ruggedness. Maybe they never had it. I believe to
be a man is to be tough mentally and physically. To have a small set of
skills to survive from day to day when needed. Like lifting weights or
boxing in a dust and spider-web-infested concrete shed with a tin roof.
Where it’s sweltering in the summer and freezer-burn-cold in the winter,
to keep the body and mind tough. Hunting and fishing to hone the skills
my father and grandfather passed onto me.
I’ve
met guys who take great pride in their cars but can’t even change a
flat tire, guys who glory in a steak dinner but squirm when I speak of
killing a deer. They struggle with baiting a worm onto a fishing hook
and can’t stand the site of gutting, scaling, and cleaning fish. My
mother and grandmother did all of this and without effort. I grew up
around strong-willed and even more capable females the same as I did
males.
And
when walking the isles of a bookstore, those are the characteristics
that interest me most, writers who shed light on what masculinity means,
what it is to be tough, to be rugged, to be able to take care of your
damn self.WWII - A Likely Excuse
A man returns a book 69 years later. Blames the war.
From a piece on the Huffington Post...
An Estonian man has returned a library book 69 years late, partly blaming a World War II aerial bombing that damaged the library for the late return.
Ivika Turkson of the Tallinn Central Library says that last week the man in his mid-80s returned the overdue book – which was checked out on March 7, 1944, while Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany – along with an apology and an offer to pay a late fee.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Tim Wallach
A man is attempting to collect every Tim Wallach baseball card. Literally, he wants every Tim Wallach baseball card ever produced.
Check out his site, here.
Do Poets Sleep?
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The New York Times talks insomnia and poetry.
From the story...
Poets may not suffer from insomnia more than other people, but they seem more likely to write about it. For centuries, long before Thomas Edison (himself a famous insomniac who called his scientific team the “insomnia squad”) facilitated the insomnia of so many of us by helping to invent the electric light bulb, poets from a wide range of cultures have written about their wakeful, nocturnal anguish and ecstatic vision. In the eighth century, the Chinese poet Tu Fu, in a translation by Sam Hamill, pined, “Sleepless, memories of war betray me: / I am powerless against the world.” Patumanar, a poet of the Tamil period of Indian literature, writes (in a translation by A.K. Ramunujan), that “Even the far-flung world / has put aside its rages / for sleep. / Only I / am awake.”
Does the study linking insomnia to troubled breathing, which, as one article stated, challenges “the predominant theory of insomnia as a problem of ‘hyper-arousal,’ in which the body idles on high psychologically and physiologically,” change the way we think about and “read” insomniacal art? A dark night of the soul, heartache, remorse, guilt, desire, God-hunger — surely this, and not obstructed airways or a drop in oxygen levels, is the stuff of poetry.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Spider-Man Turns 50
The Atlantic celebrates.
From the piece...
Amazing Spider-Man #1 hit shelves 50 years ago, on March 10, 1963. Since then, Spider-Man has spawned four—soon to be five—big-budget movies, nine TV shows, a stage play, a radio drama partially masterminded by Brian Mays of Queen, a few dozen video games, and, of course, thousands of comic books and toys. He's a major figure, and he deserves to be: Spider-Man redefined our idea of a hero by making superheroes a lot more relatable than they were before.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Should We Equate Comic Books with Traditional Literature?
That's the question posed by Varsity Online.
From the piece...
Even the terminology surrounding this question is fiercely debated. Whereas most like to refer to works such as Maus as ‘graphic novels’, the term seems to be a hopeful attempt to disassociate the new breed of ‘intelligent’ comics from tales of superheroes, making a clear distinction between comic- book-pulp-fiction and high-art -visual-narratives. Publisher Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape chooses not to make a distinction between comic books and graphic novels, although he admits that, “because the books we publish are at the more literary end of the spectrum I’m probably inclined to think of them as graphic novelists first.” Comic book theorist Scott McCloud – at the forefront of the new ‘academicising’ movement – prefers to call them ‘sequential narratives.’ However, this term is yet to catch on in popular usage. Practitioner Nick Hayes, a former student at Emmanuel College and author of acclaimed graphic novel The Rime of the Modern Mariner, is more relaxed about the matter: “people get all in a fluster about this. The most pretentious of the lot is Sequential Artist, but I think you may as well print up a T-shirt that proclaims your own self-esteem paranoia... I tend to change my job title to suit its audience.”
This year, two graphic works were shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards for the first time in the prize’s history. Winning the biography category was Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, by Mary and Bryan Talbot - a comic-strip life of James Joyce’s daughter, blended with memoirs of Mary’s father; in the novel category Joff Winterhart’s linear story of a holiday, Days of the Bagnold Summer, went up against Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies. Is it fair to judge such different mediums against each other? In his 1766 work Laocoon, Lessing criticised the comparison of pictures with words, contesting that they are so different that they should never be compared. However, such a simple division of the two is not possible with comic books. Hayes thinks that the best comic books have an equal emphasis on both elements: “I think the best comics place equal emphasis on the words and the images, or at least make some kind of balance – I think the most striking effect a comic has is the initial view of a two-page spread, when you have just turned a page – at that point, the words have no meaning, as they are not immediately discernible, but they operate as shapes which break up the flow of other shapes. That’s how I try to see them when designing my pages.”
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
A Literary History of Oz
Lit Reactor goes down the yellow brick road.
From the piece...
The story most of us are familiar with is based on L. Frank Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Illustrated by W.W. Denslow, who shared the copyright, it was the nation's best-selling children's book for two years and sold more than five million copies before its copyright expired in 1956. (All of Baum's Oz books are in the public domain now, so go nuts writing a stage version featuring turtles and hand puppets or fan fiction that replaces Dorothy with a sluttier version of Agent Scully.) Those might seem like meager sales numbers in today's 100-million-plus-sold world of Twilight and Fifty Shades, but Oz's sales figures were nothing to scoff at in the early 1900s. It was, essentially, the Harry Potter of its time.
As an inspirational aside to struggling writers who don't happen to be 22-year-old wunderkind: Note that Baum—who ultimately gave us one of the most beloved stories of all time—wrote his first book (let's not count the instructional volume on chicken rearing he put out when he was 30), at the age of forty-one. This after years spent raising fancy chickens, starting a poultry journal, running a variety store, selling fireworks, and editing a magazine about department store window displays. The first of his fourteen Oz books was published when he was 44. Baum wrote a total of fifty-five novels (fourteen Oz-related and the rest less-successful fantasy and fairy tales), more than eighty short stories (including six Little Wizard Stories Of Oz for younger readers), and an untold number of stage plays, poems, and odd tomes about stamp dealing, poultry, and decorating windows. It's never too late to chase the dream.
The Women Behind Russia's Most Famous Authors
The Moscow News takes a look.
From the piece...
Nadezhda Mandelstam's brother once commented that she and her husband - the brilliant, doomed poet Osip Mandelstam - were becoming so close that "Nadezhda" seemed no longer to exist.
"That's how we like it," she replied.
Russia's most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.
"What people know about is that Sophia copied out Tolstoy's great novels, but it was much more than that," said Alexandra Popoff, author of the 2012 book "The Wives: The Women behind Russia's Literary Giants." "They discussed things together - there was a spark. And without it, the ‘War and Peace' that the world admires wouldn't have been written."
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
The Revolution at Your Local Library
The New Republic takes a look at libraries in our digital age.
From the piece...
Around the globe, a handful of innovative architects are forging a new building type with a deceptively familiar name. These libraries offer something found nowhere else in the contemporary city: heavily used, not-for-profit communal spaces that facilitate many and various kinds of informal social interactions and private uses. Ranging in size from five thousand square feet, a smallish McMansion in Westchester, to thirty thousand square feet, the size of Derek Jeter’s home near Tampa, some of these community libraries are neighborhood branches of an urban library system, and others stand alone. These buildings look nothing like one another, yet they all offer exemplary moments of architectural innovation. Collectively, they make the case that excellent design is no luxury, certainly not for the civic buildings and lives of people and their communities.
Community libraries have been around for centuries. Andrew
Carnegie did not invent them, but recognized in them the means to
socialize the cost of knowledge, building nearly 1,700 public libraries
across the United States in twenty-eight years. Across the country,
local philanthropists built countless others, recognizing that the
community library was often the only place to which people had sustained
and repeated access simply by virtue of their residence. Even today, to
become officially recognized as a borrower at your local library, no
more than a recent electric bill is needed—no passport, no green card,
no social security number, no purchase necessary. To use the library to
sit and read and rest, you need only to want to sit and read and rest.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Mechanical Bureau
I want this to be my writing desk. Please, someone, get me one. Thanks, in advance...
The Death of the American Pun
Salon laments.
From the piece...
I should make it clear that I have never seen an episode of the reality show. I hate Bridezillas for one simple reason: Bride does not rhyme with god. Ergo, Bridezillas is not a functioning pun.
The point is significant because bridezilla appears
to be symptomatic of a wider malaise: the death of the American pun,
replaced by something grosser, dumber, uglier. Examples abound: Take one
of the most read websites in the world, Wikipedia, a “pun” on encyclopedia that shares nothing but its suffix. Or techpreneur, the loathsome fusion of technology and entrepreneur. Likewise mansplain,
a coinage popular with Internet feminists that adroitly glosses a man
addressing a woman in a condescending fashion (e.g., “Akam mansplains
that mansplain is not a functioning pun.”) but is still not a functioning pun. Manscaping, the removal of all or part of male body hair, is better—there is at least assonance between the vowel sounds in man and land—but as a pun it remains perilously borderline.
So if recessionista and fembot are
not really puns, what are they? They’re neolexic portmanteaus, in which
root words are brutally slammed together with cavalier lack of wit.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Saturday, March 09, 2013
Handkerchief Maps
A map...on a handkerchief.
From a piece on Booktryst...
Handkerchief maps date back to the late 18th century. Examples featuring the plan for Washington D.C. werre sold as "'an authentic plan of the Metropolis of the United States,' advertised as an accurate guide for the prospective purchaser of lots but also as 'a very handsome ornament for the parlor or counting room" (Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, p. 14). These handkerchief maps are believed to have been printed in Boston in 1792 in connection with "the sale of lots in the new 'Federal Town'" (Works Progress Administration, Washington: City and Capital, p. xiv).
Friday, March 08, 2013
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Monday, March 04, 2013
The Bright Star Mobile Library
After decades living and working abroad, Saeed Malik returned to his native Pakistan and wanted to do something to help rectify what he saw as a poor education system. He founded the Bright Star Mobile Library, which now serves about 2,500 children.
From a piece on NPR...
Malik says one boy told him he wanted to be a mujahed because if he died as a martyr, he, his family and friends would go to heaven. Malik says he was thoroughly disheartened.
"And I felt, in what way can we bring these kids back to the beauty of life, to the beauty of future, to be of value to fellow mankind and to themselves and to the country," he says. "And I started thinking in what way can we help the children."
Malik felt books were the way to broaden children's minds, to introduce them to a whole world of subjects, and to help build tolerance for others. But he discovered that virtually none of the public schools in and around Islamabad had libraries. A few keep a small selection of books under lock and key; others offer children religious pamphlets as reading material.
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Did Human Language Evolve from Birdsong?
Possibly!
From a press release from MIT...
"The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language," Charles Darwin wrote in "The Descent of Man" (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which "might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions."
Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path. The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.
"It's this adventitious combination that triggered human language," says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics in MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and co-author of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The idea builds upon Miyagawa's conclusion, detailed in his previous work, that there are two "layers" in all human languages: an "expression" layer, which involves the changeable organization of sentences, and a "lexical" layer, which relates to the core content of a sentence. His conclusion is based on earlier work by linguists including Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser.
What Was It Like to Be a Sweet Valley High Ghostwriter?
Ask Amy Boesky.
From her piece in the Kenyon Review...
Imagine, superimposed on the gray-and-grainy screen of a floundering, slightly depressed twenty-something, the shimmery outlines of an idealized adolescent world. All drawn—I just had to color it in. I could pick any colors, as long as they were pastel! The characters were already invented. They had “histories,” personalities, but I could add nuances. The plots were already there. Who could have dreamed of such adventures? A plane crash in a Cessna. Hysterical paralysis following a bad break-up. The rich posing as poor and the poor as rich. The tennis star that longed to be ordinary, the ordinary girl that longed to be a starlet. Differences smoothed away by the sameness-machine of narrative. The teachers with secrets, the students with secrets, the secrets revealed, the revelations turned into new secrets. The core secret—the one I knew, and harbored myself, and saw in those around me—the bland central core of “sameness,” of normalcy. How different were any of us, despite our attenuated lives as graduate students, from anybody else? The darkest of dark secrets: how much I hadn’t read, and didn’t know. How little I felt I had to say that was different, or new, or mattered.
Your task, my thesis advisor in Oxford told my tutorial partner and me, is to be original. Your thesis won’t pass otherwise.
I haunted the bookshops, certain my argument had already been written. Afraid to ask him: is original the same thing as different? As important, or relevant, or even good?
Writing for Sweet Valley High, I wasn’t supposed to be original. Or different. My job was to pick up somebody else’s thread and follow it: just write the story. Spice it up with dialogue, add a toss of a blond curl here, a sparkle of a blue-green eye there. Create a subplot and weave it through the narrative.
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother Inspires Novel
NPR discusses the new book, Mary Coin.
From the piece...
I feared that Silver's novel might be "colorized," too, punching up its account of the meeting between Lange and Thompson and, in particular, sanctifying Thompson's maternal ordeal, to make the story appealing to women's book clubs across the land. But curiosity trumped cynicism, especially since Lange's photograph, even in this altered form, always commands attention. What I found is that, far from romanticizing the suffering of the Great Depression, Silver stares at it hard, square in the face, just as Lange must have done that March day in 1936 when, on assignment for the federal Farm Security Administration, she drove into the migrant workers camp, took six photos of Thompson and her children and then drove away.
Silver is an evocative, precise writer, and her story — really interlocking tales — takes readers deep into the callous realities of life during the Dirty '30s.
Saturday, March 02, 2013
11 Most Controversial Comic Books of All-Time
The list, care of the Huffington Post.
From the piece...
Like a lot of people who work in comics - or who just grew up in the second half of the twentieth century loving "funny books" - I was not surprised to learn that Dr. Frederic Wertham had, in his famous 1954 anti-comic book screed Seduction of the Innocent, "manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence." On February 19, the New York Times reported this conclusion, reached by University of Illinois Assistant Professor Carol L. Tilley, who examined Wertham's papers at the Library of Congress.
Wielding his psychiatric credentials as a cudgel, Wertham used the media, including that nascent sector called television, to insist that comic books were inherently for children, and that adult content could, in fact did, warp young minds. Comic books like Crime Does Not Pay were intended to teach youngsters the methods of criminals and the glorification of murder. Horror comic books twisted young minds with scenes of violence and gore, while Batman and Wonder Woman encouraged homosexuality - after all, Bruce Wayne lived with a young boy, and Wonder Woman frolicked with her sisters on an island. And Superman, well, he was obviously the personification of the Nazi super-fascist - never mind that a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland created him.
For the comic book industry, the 2013 exposure of Wertham comes a little late.
Friday, March 01, 2013
Women Who Fight Back in Literature
The Boston Review surveys the literary landscape for women who fight and fight hard.
From the piece...
Ah, Medea—the first bad girl of literature, if one discounts Lilith, who’s never given a chance to voice her own opinion of Adam before he dumps her for Eve. Medea, the raging fury, is most remarkable not so much for her extensive list of crimes, knowledge of poisons, or lack of what modern readers might call sympathetic traits as for her unrepentant, single-minded desire for vengeance against her two-timing lover, Jason. First she poisons his innocent bride, gloating at the news of her anguished death. Then, with her own hands, though not without some protracted anguish of her own, she kills her two young children by Jason. Refusing the grief-stricken Jason a final embrace of the boys’ corpses, she gives him a terse kiss-off—“Your words are wasted.”
Medea might cast a cold eye on Larsson’s characterization of Salander as a near-anorexic, childlike waif who musters almost superhuman powers in her own quest for vengeance. Emphasizing Salander’s youth and gamine appearance evokes some disturbing similarities with Bella—the weirdly infantilized, profoundly unsexy narrator of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series—and with Fifty Shades of Grey’s equally dumb and vanilla BDSM protagonist Anastasia, whose college education might have benefited from a SparkNotes reading of Mary Gaitskill and Mrs. Gaskell.
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