Sore throat? All the time. Bored with what you’re reading? No doubt. Even when it’s your own work. And let’s not talk about the difference between words authors know how to write and words authors know how to read. – The Guardian (UK)
Category: words
How To Follow Up A Number One Bestseller: Throw Away Your Internet
Erin Morgenstern’s second book debuted at number three on the bestseller list after she spent years working on her sophomore venture. How did she work, especially after the events of 2016? She didn’t have internet for a couple of years, and also, well, video games. – The New York Times
After One Week Of Freedom, Turkish Author Ahmet Altan Is Re-Arrested
The court that had sentenced Altan, along with his brother and one colleague, to ten years in prison (on a charge of assisting the attempted 2016 coup that many believe was trumped-up) ordered them released under supervision last week. But the chief prosecutor appealed that decision, and police promptly went to detain Altan again. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Urban Dictionary Has Become A Research Tool, A Legal Resource, And Sometimes Even A Style Arbiter
Writer Christine Ro gives an overview of the ways the crowdsourced slang dictionary, now 20 years old (ancient in internet terms), is being used by (among others) linguists and sociologists, state DMVs, and attorneys and judges. (Then there was the time IBM tried using Urban Dictionary as a data set to feed the famous AI computer Watson.) – JSTOR Daily
How Technology Has Changed How Comic Books Are Made
“I recall in the late ’80s, we were all so sure that every discipline of comics creation would switch over to being done with the aid of the personal computer. Well, 30 years later, people pencil and ink comics in relatively the same way that they have since the art form began. But the job of colorist and letterer has changed and been completely taken over by the computer.” – The New York Times
Why Do We Even Need Fiction? Asks Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Why invent things when nature and life supply so many strange events? … Why bother proving a lie when truth needs no preface? I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time. But why should I be afraid? Just because I would personally be one of the victims? No, it’s not just that.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
The One-Sentence-1,000-Pages Novel Missed Out On The Booker, But It’s Won This Prize
Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport was an obvious choice for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize, which honors “fiction at its most novel.” Jury chair Erica Wagner said, “In her gripping and hypnotic book, Ellmann remakes the novel and expands the reader’s idea of what is possible with the form.” (In a separate essay, fellow judge Anna Leszkiewicz writes about why Ducks, Newburyport is the winner.) – New Statesman
On Words Out Of Cultural Context And Banning Or Favoriting Them
“The United States has never been totally segregated, but this new world exposes everyone to everyone else in unprecedented intensity. Just like we sound like our friends, just like someone with a new friend group will inevitably find bits of new language and inside jokes slipped into their own speech, vernacular from here and there and wherever sneaks into conversations between people who’ve never been to those places.” – Public Books
Why Britain’s Working Classes Are In To The Classics
“Classical materials have been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks.” – Aeon
Amos Oz And The Challenges Of A Language Brought Back From The Dead
“To Oz, writing in Hebrew was like sculpting in solid rock and crusted sand at the same time. With one foot in the Hebrew of the Bible and the other in the mélange of linguistic influences that made up the vernacular in a young country of immigrants, the language could make a speaker prone to making missteps of word choice: ‘you don’t want to bring in Isaiah and Psalms and Mount Sinai’ to describe an argument over pocket change.” – The New Yorker