Category: words

In the land of the Taliban? Yes — Afghanistan is historically part of the Persianate world (Dari, the official language, is a Persian dialect), and metaphor-filled erotic poetry has a thousand-year history in Persian literature. Hundreds of young writers have lately been posting their amorous verse on social media, and while there has certainly been backlash, there’s no censorship by the Afghan government. – The Guardian

“Sex is an experience of intense vulnerability, and it is also where we are at our most performative, and so it’s at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come. … Sex is a uniquely useful tool for a writer, a powerful means not just of revealing character or exploring relationships, but of asking the largest questions about human beings.” – The Guardian

What does he think will happen now? “Nothing will go back to how it was and the new normal will reflect some aspects of lockdown life. More people will work from home, more people will cook at home, more restaurants will deliver food and more producers will have a closer access to consumers. These are morsels of good fortune that we should cling to.” – LitHub

Odell’s simply considering things, not worried about producing art during the lockdown. “I have been thinking about that redirecting of attention. Our grocery store has the usual spaced-out lines with markings on the ground, and as you stand in line you just find yourself standing near this weird part of the building that you would never stand near. So now you have all this time to contemplate this wall. That seemed like a visual metaphor for everything else. The thing has always been here; now you’re like standing in a very weird relation to it and you’re looking at it.” – Vox

French publishing, and its associated literary prizes like the (now somewhat disgraced) Goncourt, has long crowded the fall with a flood of titles (which has, in normal years, made the spring frantic for publishers getting the word out). But can that continue? One agent: “Why must so many prizes be awarded at the same time of the year? What logic is behind this? With a more balanced spread of editorial production, the chances of a larger number of books would be increased.” – Le Monde

Nana Ruby reads almost her weight in books every week, but the libraries are closed. Where to turn? – The New York Times

Will publishers finally use their data to sell books themselves instead of relying on the fragile chain that is Amazon? Will indies survive? Will they survive if they combine forces? It’s all a mess, but: “This time of seclusion has put the book centre stage once again; it has not seemed so alive, or so vital, in many years.” – The Observer (UK)

Seriously, the lists stopped mattering around the second, or was it third, or fourth? week of quarantine. “Our rapid shift from laser-focused self-improvement to read-all-the-things omnivorousness is a welcome reminder of something that’s long been true of modern civilization: All reading is quarantine reading.” – The Washington Post

Australian writer Mem Fox knows what it’s like to worry about being well enough, surviving long enough, to finish a book. “She feels the terror in her body – something like cold sweats and slight panic attacks. She wonders sometimes whether she will survive the coming winter. But within that terror – and boredom, as she lay in her hospital bed unable even to queue up podcasts – she began to write a story in her head.” – The Guardian (UK)

“In a kid’s world, cooties and other similar contagions may not be real — but they’re deadly serious. The North American children’s lore of cooties is ‘a social contaminant that pass[es] from one child to another, a form of interpersonal pollution.’ … Children who play this game learn and absorb concepts familiar to a public health emergency” (such as immunization — remember cooties shots?), “but on their own strange terms. … [The] search for a satisfactory meaning might not mean much when it comes to children. Because nonsense makes a lot of sense in a kid’s world.” – JSTOR Daily