Enjoy, care of BibliOdyssey.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Sylvia Plath - 50 Years After Her Death
She's still going strong.
From a piece in the Independent...
Plath is a defining voice in 20th-century poetry. For women poets she was also a turning-point, a new vocal role model, but purely as poet she is part of the tradition for the whole poetic community. Most of today's leading poets, men included, would be different if she hadn't written. Each in a different way would be thinner, and have less sense of linguistic possibility – of where a voice can go, freedom, blaze and reach - without her.
Some react against her work, as you do. That is how tradition works, but they still have to reckon with her and are enriched by doing so. Her greatest work has offered one touchstone for how words behave in a poem: the tone, pitch and dramatic burn; freedom, balance, and that exhilarating delight in language. In the image of her poem "Words", the linguistic units in her work are axes, "After whose stroke the word rings./ And the echoes!/ Echoes travelling/ Off from the centre like horses.// The sap/ Wells like tears, like the/ Water striving/ To re-establish its mirror/ Over the rock…"
But Plath had a complicated, painful and much mythologised life, and this life can film the poems over with peripherals.
The First Kindle...from 1935
It was, however, a little unwieldy.
A story in the Daily Mail...
The drawing carries the explanatory labels: 'miniature film carries photographs of book pages', 'page reproduced (enlarged)', 'ground glass screen', 'button turns leaf', 'adjusting focus' and 'swing screen to proper angle.'
It is not known whether the device was ever developed.
The design was carried in the magazine, 'Everyday science and mechanics' in its April 1935 edition.
The first generation Kindle was released in America in November 2007 to a fanfare of publicity and sold out in five and half hours.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Conspiracy Theories on Classic Literary Characters
Wait a minute. Was Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, gay and in love with the novel’s eponymous character?
Some thoughts on that, and other conspiracies, care of Flavorwire.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Lost Robert Burns Poems Discovered
Original versions of two poems, as well as letter from poet's beloved 'Clarinda' have been found.
From a story in the Guardian...
"I get quite a few calls like this, and I tried to let her down gently," he said. "But she said she still thought I should have a look. Within 15 minutes of looking at them I could see there was some very important and original material."
Also unearthed were a handwritten manuscript by Burns himself of the song "Phillis the fair", with minor textual variations, a pencil manuscript by Burns of an early draft of "Ode to a Woodlark", lost since 1877-1879, and a handwritten letter from Burns "to Robert Muir, Kilmarnock". The treasure trove also contained a letter from Clarinda to Burns, dated 2 August 1791 and containing for the first time her complete poetic response to Burns's poem "On Sensibility."
The Allure of the 1st Novel
A first novel holds a special place in an author's heart – sometimes it is the only book they will write, sometimes the best. Occasionally, the writer would prefer to forget it altogether.
From a story in the Guardian...
First novels are special. They represent the first thing a writer wants to say about the world. They are often believed to be heavily autobiographical, but of course may not be. Mine, begun in Paris in 1984 and finished in London five years later, was about two men, apparently doubles of each other, who live in London and Paris. One is a tightrope walker who is mutilating himself in his sleep, gradually slicing his penis into halves, an eighth of an inch at a time, while the other is working as an actor in a theatre production in the French capital.Some newspapers have a special column for reviews of first novels, which would appear to hand them special status, like a distinct genre. They are generally afforded a little leeway by critics; there's an unwritten rule that you don't slag off first novels.
Some writers write only one novel – their first and last. Near-contemporaries HP Lovecraft and Rainer Maria Rilke, authors of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge respectively, were better known as a short story writer and a poet. Arguably, they were also better at writing short stories and poetry than writing novels. Another poet, who did write an outstanding novel and may well have gone on to write more, was Sylvia Plath.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
William Saroyan's Mustache Clippings
As trash goes, authors' clutter in the right hands equals big money.
From a story in the Wall Street Journal...
Authors, take notice: Remember those crates of scratch pads and tax returns in the garage? The trunkful of hotel bills and childhood doodles in the garden shed? Don't junk any of it—not before you call up somebody in Ken Lopez's line of work.
Mr. Lopez, who has a book-jammed office in this small town, is a broker—one of a dozen in the country—who deals in the flotsam of authorship. He sells to rich research libraries, which sort it and shelve it so scholars can mine it for clues to creativity.
"If you had William Faulkner's laundry list, would you care?" Mr. Lopez said not long ago. "The answer is, 'Yes.' So if it's true for Faulkner," he added rhetorically, "it could be true for you."
Being dead helps but isn't required. Mailer sold his 1,062 boxes for $2.5 million in 2005 and died in 2007. In 2003, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sold 83 Watergate boxes, also to the Ransom, for $5 million. After 20 years of marketing for the likes of William S. Burroughs (dead) and Peter Matthiessen (alive), Mr. Lopez puts prices for interesting paper piles at $30,000 to $300,000.
How Should Shakespeare Really Sound?
That was the question recently posed by the Telegraph.
From the piece...
Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that
American accents are "closer" than contemporary English to the
accents of those used in the Bard's day.
The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's
accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary
Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent.
Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in
modern day Shakespeare productions.
Well, now you can judge for yourself.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Why Do Literary Readings Always Make Me Want to Kill Myself?
That's the question posed by The Moving Finger.
From the piece...
Because
literary readings are subconsciously viewed as the cultural equivalent of
bran. They’re good for us and therefore something we dutifully attend,
like church or a community college life drawing class. They remind us of
school. We associate them with homework, just as we might a visit to the
textile museum. Yay,
we get a day off school but, boo,
we’re still learning about stuff. Whereas activities such as mini-golf,
laser tag, electro-stim—we think of these as entertainments, something we do
for fun in our leisure time. Literary readings aren’t going to shake
their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people
who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.
Organizers must insist to themselves and their audience that having some
shlubby author stand up and grunt into a microphone while holding a book in
front of his terrified, sun-deprived face equals one rip-snorter of a Wednesday
night.
How
do you do this? Here are some very basic strategies.
1—Serve liquor.
The Penguin Random House Merger
The new industry giant has made room for a wide variety of new initiatives that are good news for authors, publishers and readers.
From a story in the Guardian...
So what does this mean for reading, writing and publishing? It is certainly a dramatic opening chord in a new movement, a movement that will be high tempo and full of development of familiar subjects in new ways.
Firstly, there will be change to the structure of the industry with fewer large players with greater strength, better placed to support the value of both authors' copyrights and publisher activities. Publishers (and therefore writers) have been too vulnerable to the rapid aggregation of retail power both on and offline and stronger publishing structures will be good for writers so long as these larger publishing entities are clear their role is to create value for both writers and shareholders.
Secondly, smaller publishers can thrive in this context as a more clearly differentiated option for writers. These publishers will offer a more intimate, imagination-based and niche partnership for writers.
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
The Book Boys of Mumbai
The New York Times discusses Mumbai's street kids who sell books.
From the piece...
Ever since children have slept on Mumbai’s streets, they have worked on
them, whether as sellers of trinkets or of talismans. The city has
thousands of street children, but only a chosen few get to sell books.
These are children like Yakub, who lives with his family and has a place
to call home, even if it is on the pavement and contrived of bamboo
poles and scavenged tarp. Such children are considered high-value
sellers, more reliable than those who live in gangs without any parental
supervision. Because the cost of one book is many times that of a
handful of trinkets, book suppliers, who are called “seths,” or bosses,
value trustworthiness in their ranks above all else. Suppliers
traditionally hire only boys. “Boys move fast in traffic, and they carry
many more books,” explained Ganesh, a seth I spoke with in Haji Ali.
Ganesh, who uses only one name, is just 19 years old and has 15 boys
working under his direction.
Bosses like Ganesh pick child peddlers over adults because they’re happy
to earn small amounts. And they do exactly as told. Selling in traffic
is also considered a starter job. After dodging speeding buses for a few
years, inevitably suffering injury, child peddlers typically graduate
to safer work as hawkers of fruits or temple flowers. If they’re
ambitious, they become seths, working a group of children as they
themselves were once worked.
When Oscar Wilde Visited America
The Daily Beast follows in the man's footsteps.
From the story...
Wilde then went off to Philadelphia
for a lecture at the Horticultural Hall—he was bored, as so many others
along the way were, by the train’s views of New Jersey. He then called
on Walt Whitman in Camden, where he drank elderberry wine and milk-punch
(“a stoutish mixture of milk and whiskey”), offered praise, and
received some admonishment:
When
he ventured the starchy observation that he, Wilde, couldn’t bear “to
listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style, or by beauty
of theme,” the older poet put him in his place. “Why, Oscar,” said
Whitman, “it always seems to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at
beauty is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an
abstraction.” Wilde quickly retreated. “Yes,” he said, “I think so too.”
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Monday, January 07, 2013
Do the Choose Your Own Adventure Books Still Hold Up?
That's the question posed by the AV Club.
From the story...
In a sense, The Cave Of Time was the perfect way to launch CYOA. Most subsequent volumes focused on a single tableau: outer space, Greek mythology, the Old West. The Cave Of Time encompasses many of these, in effect serving as a teaser of what was to come. Reading the book now, it’s amazing how perfectly Packard nailed the format and parameters of the series—enough so that he was able to farm out most future installments to various writers-for-hire. Just as the seeds of possibility are planted in the first scene of every CYOA book, so was the series’ potential planted in the first book.
That didn’t help me get through The Cave Of Time this time around, though. Increasingly agitated by second-person voice—not to mention the fact that I’m being told not just what to do, but how I think and feel as I react to meeting Abraham Lincoln or being press-ganged into helping build The Great Wall Of China—I started looking for “The End” at the bottoms of pages. One thing struck me as I skimmed through the dozens of conclusions that Packard lays out: He’s a sadistic bastard.
Stalking Harper Lee
Amy Whitaker, for the Millions, goes to Alabama.
From the piece...
As it turns out, I will not meet Harper Lee, but I will get to go to the church picnic, take a nap on the sofa of the president of the Chamber of Commerce, have a farm lunch and traipse through pastures with Truman Capote’s cousin, and be a bonnet-wearing extra in the play two days later. I will meet people starting properly Aristotelian four-year interdisciplinary programs at the local junior college, programs that sound a lot less like student loan factories than formative learning experiences. I will meet the police detective who plays Boo Radley, both Atticuses, two Scouts, and Crissy, an almost-Belgian existential philosopher who married a local doctor and runs the town’s one coffee shop. Like any life adventure or creative process, this is all steeped in the texture of everyday life — from daily drives past the vast Wal-Mart they call Wally World, to the man who wants to help Dawn get ice for her lemonade stand but quips, “The worst thing about losing the city council election was giving up the key to the ice machine.”
I will come to believe that the really interesting thing about Harper Lee is, moment to moment, what happens next. Harper Lee’s own life sounds fascinating, and I start to fantasize that she is a person I would have liked to be friends with, or even who is a little bit like myself. But to make her a character instead of a person — even inside her own mythology — is not as interesting as the living breathing life-as-art practice of all the townspeople who guard her privacy fiercely, who work as the bank CEO by day and play Atticus by night, and who print me a volunteer nametag even though I can’t give directions to anything but the ladies room, and offer me Styrofoam cups of Malibu Tropical Mojito out of a giant Capri-Sun container as we chat with Miss Stephanie backstage during the play. Crissy the bookstore owner who witnessed Lee’s cameo at lunch said, “Those people have no class, snapping pictures on their cell phones. They post them to Facebook and say they had lunch with Harper Lee.” She says it kindly in playful humor.
Sunday, January 06, 2013
A Literary Guide to the NFL Post Season
The guide, care of New York Daily News.
From the piece...
4. Washington: With uncommon poise to match his prodigious talent, rookie Robert Griffin III deserves all the praise he gets. However, the team’s fortunes may ride just as much on their unassuming and bruising rookie running back Albert Morris. As this unlikely duo rushes forward into the future, they must be careful because they hold the fragile hopes and dreams of a delicate fanbase in their hands.
Literary Equivalent: “Of Mice and Men” (John Steinbeck)
5. Seattle: The Seahawks may very well be the most feared team heading into the playoffs, but they remain vulnerable away from home. Can Russell Wilson and his crew survive an extended road trip and return home victorious?
Literary Equivalent: “The Odyssey” (Homer)
Banned Sex Manual Goes Under the Hammer
Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece, which set out ideas on sexual relationships and pregnancy, first appeared around 1680.
From a story in the Guardian...
The book is thought to have served as a reference guide for amateur midwives and young married couples. It includes dire warnings about the possible consequences of extramarital sex.
"There's nothing in it that would really be considered dirty in our society now. It's funny more than anything," Marsden said. "There are various things which warn parents about what could happen to their children if they sinned whilst conceiving them, perhaps by having sex outside marriage. It would say that your baby would be born all hairy or it would suggest that conjoined twins were the result of the parents' sins.
"There are also interesting bits about the 17th century notion that it was considered beneficial for a woman to enjoy sexual intercourse in order to conceive. It suggests that both men and women should enjoy sex.
Saturday, January 05, 2013
12 Historical Speeches Nobody Heard
The list, care of Mental Floss.
From said list...
1. “In Event of Moon Disaster”
As the world nervously waited for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land on the moon, Nixon speechwriter William Safire penned a speech in case the astronauts were stranded in space. The memo was addressed to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff, and includes chilling directions for the president, NASA, and clergy in case something went awry.
Revealing Superman's Real-Life Identity
His name was Stanley Weiss.
From a story in the New York Times...
In 1945, some seven years after he had been regularly illustrating Superman adventures written by his partner, Jerry Siegel, Shuster encountered a young man who looked exactly like the Superman character as he imagined him. He asked the man, named Stanley Weiss, if he could draw him, resulting in some sketches that have gone largely unseen for nearly 70 years, as well as some insights into the origins of this long-lived American champion.
Shuster’s pencil sketches of the square-jawed Weiss, who strongly resembles a certain Kryptonian immigrant and his earthly alter ego, Clark Kent, will be shown publicly at the Center for Jewish History in Chelsea, at a Jan. 27 event celebrating the 75th anniversary of Superman.
The Gay Teen-Boy Romance Comic Beloved by Women in Japan
It's the Heart of Thomas.
From a story in the Atlantic...
At first glance, Moto Hagio's classic Japanese manga (or comic) The Heart of Thomas looks suspiciously like a serialized soap opera. There are hyperbolically unrequited crushes, stolen kisses, vertiginous swoons, shocking secrets revealed, tragic death after tragic death till the protagonists can barely emote their way around all the beautiful corpses—and even, at the center of the plot, an improbable pair of distantly-related doubles, whose identical features spurn the dry touch of genetics for the sweeping caress of melodrama.
There is one thing, though, that definitively and obviously sets Heart of Thomas apart from daytime serials. Hagio's story is set in a German boarding school. In case the implications aren't clear, that means that all the characters are boys, and all the romances are gay.
Friday, January 04, 2013
25 Writer Resolutions for 2013
The list, care of Terrible Minds.
From said list...
1. Level Up, Ding
Up your game. Always. With every paragraph, every chapter, every script scene and blog post, we should be looking to level up our work and ourselves. We level up, we gain new weapons in our fight against Shitty Writing (“I HAVE THE ANCIENT SWORD OF THE HAIKU MASTERS, IT IS +1 AGAINST RUN-ON-SENTENCES”) and we face new challenges in the road ahead (“NOW I MUST DEFEAT THE LITERARY AGENT IN BATTLE USING NOTHING BUT A QUERY LETTER AND SOME BAD-ASS DANCE MOVES”). We must never sit on our hands. We must pull our boots out of the mud. We must move forward and improve ourselves and our work. We must better our shit.
2. Let Art And Entertainment Have A Little Creative Love Baby
Once upon a time I thought, my goal as a writer is first to entertain. And that remains true, to a point — but the more I think about it, the more I realize “entertainment” is a lowest common denominator. If my only true goal was to entertain, I could achieve that by uploading a series of YouTube videos where various things hit me in the dick (Frisbee! Coconut! Bowling ball! Charging goat! A goat driving a lawnmower!). A good story connects beyond mere amusement; its tendrils sink into deeper earth, winding around the human heart. Let’s aspire to do more than merely entertain. Let us reach for meaning, for connection, let us present stories with purpose and power. (Or, at the very least, we could write porn. HEY PORN COUNTS SHUT UP.)
Shelf Conscious
The Paris Review takes a look at the history of bookshelves and what one can glean from someone by looking at their bookshelves.
From the piece...
In the Middle Ages, when monasteries were the closest equivalent to a public library, monks kept works in their carrels. To increase circulation, these works were eventually chained to inclined desks, or lecterns, thus giving ownership of a work to a particular lectern rather than a particular monk. But as collections grew, surface space diminished, and books came to be stacked on shelves above the lectern, at first one and then many. The problem, of course, was that two books chained next to each another couldn’t be comfortably studied at the same time: elbows knocked; shackles clinked and tangled.
Hence the innovation of vertical storage. One book could be removed without disturbing the rest. Yet the transition was gradual. Books in monasteries retained their chains for some time, and many leather covers, particularly in private libraries, protruded irregularly, tricked-out as they were with embossing and jewels. Those books that did stand were oriented with their spines to the back of the shelf.
Britain's First Center for Book Arts
A center for the art form that combines crafts of papermaking, typesetting and bookbinding has been created, inspired by the founder's road trip in America.
From a story in the Guardian...
It could be said that book arts have been around since medieval illuminated manuscripts, but the craft as we know it emerged from the French tradition of the livres d'artistes, or livres de peinture, around the turn of the 20th century. Since then there have been futurist artists' books, surrealist artists' books, conceptual artists' books and more.
Goode said it was something of an anomaly in the UK that while there has been no centre until now, there are plenty of artists' book fairs and shops where the books are sold.
That's not the case in the US, where the first book arts centre opened in New York 38 years ago, with others following in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Goode said his trip to the US "visiting these incredible institutions" was a complete eye-opener and that it was these experiences which led him to create the London Centre for Book Arts in a 365-square metre space in Fish Island, Hackney, which has been funded by membership fees and benefactors.
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Libraries Try to Update Bookstore Model
As bookstores close, libraries are trying to fill in the gaps caused by them closing.
From a piece in the New York Times...
“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as
a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason
Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.
Renovations will turn part of the library’s first floor into an area
resembling a bookshop that officials are calling the Marketplace, with
cozy seating, vending machines and, above all, an abundance of best
sellers.
As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining
their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries
are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of
traditional bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections
and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now
call customers.
Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares,
showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books,
and offering grass-roots technology training centers. Faced with the
need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are
determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the
taxpayers as the police and fire department can.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
What's "Just Right" for a Young Reader?
How do you know the age at which to introduce children to certain books that might have “big kid” themes?
The New York Times weighs in, here.
2013's Banished Words List
Tired of hearing the term, "Fiscal Cliff"? Aren't we all?
Lake Superior State University has their list of words they no longer want to hear, here.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
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