Category: words

Despite the fact that American pop culture and the ability to speak English are considered very cool in Japan, multinational companies want their employees to know the language, and the Japanese government stresses the importance of learning English and constantly rejiggers the curriculum in the subject (which is required), well under a third of the population there speaks any English at all, with the percentage of people who are fluent in the single digits. An American journalist and translator in Nagoya looks at the structural and cultural reasons for this conundrum. – Foreign Policy

A category only exists in relation to other categories, similarly constituted. You would need to establish a number of other clearly defined hierarchies of value, or centers of interest, generating distinct, or at least recognizable, types of plot and character interaction. For example, stories in which good and evil are absolute, not subordinated to the community, which in this case would matter only in so far as it fosters goodness, not vice versa. – New York Review of Books

“A cache of 2,400 letters between the poet and his long-time lover and muse, Monica Jones, … reveal[s] the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership with the man who wrote some of the most cherished verse in the English language.” – The Observer (UK)

“Booksellers around the country say they’re experiencing ‘Christmas’ levels of demand post-lockdown, as many readers have sworn off shopping offshore following the Covid-19 crisis, which claimed 21 lives in New Zealand.” – The Guardian

Perhaps that’s obvious, but a new book “will argue that many assumptions previously made about the origins of scenes from the sagas are wrong.” – The Observer (UK)

You might (or might not) consider wolf erotica a niche market. It’s a bigger niche that is now walking through a minefield of copyright questions, with larger implications for genre writing. “As the genre commercializes, authors aggressively defend their livelihoods, sometimes using a 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to get online retailers to remove competitors’ books. When making a claim, a creator must have a ‘good faith belief’ that her ownership of the work in question has been infringed. But what does that mean when the ultimate source material is a crowdsourced collective?” – The New York Times

Not your own rant, mind you. A pair of teachers recommends using one of those vehement complaints that turn up every so often in advice columns or blogs. “[The instructors] “note that heated, emotional writing like this is more interesting to students than dry lists of rules to follow. More importantly, rants offer a clear demonstration of how powerful people make judgments — often harsh ones — based on grammar.” – JSTOR Daily

Chris Bohjalian: “If 9/11 is a literary precedent, it could be years before we will see our first rush of novels about the coronavirus pandemic.” (The first such major titles, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, appeared in 2005.) “Some will no doubt take place in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno that has been New York City’s emergency rooms, and some will be about the chaos of home schooling twin 8-year-olds while your toddler crashes your corporate Zoom meeting. Some will be about claustrophobia and the idea that hell really is other people. Or jigsaw puzzles.” – The Washington Post

The 68 staff cuts are mostly attributable to the collapse of the company’s events business, which was one of its strongest pillars for many years.

Gail Beckerman joins a New York literary salon now hosted remotely from Nairobi (“I’d never had the experience of watching in close-up such a large group of people actively listening”), the Quarantine Book Club (it hosts an author a day for regulars from all over the globe), the Borderless Book Club (a new novel in English translation every two weeks), a gathering hosted by the Academy of American Poets, a group devoted solely to Hannah Arendt, and a party where everyone logs on and just silently reads (“It’s mesmerizing, found performance art”). – The New York Times