Tag: 07.01.07

“The business is full of fiction writers like me. With one difference: I’m black, born and raised in the United States,” Martha Southgate writes. “At the parties and conferences I attend, and in the book reviews I read, I rarely encounter other African-American ‘literary’ writers, particularly in my age bracket. There just don’t seem to be that many of us out there, and that’s something I’ve come to wonder about a great deal.”

“With the glorious Fourth looming dead ahead, it’s an excellent time to play the home version of this game: What’s your pick for Great American Novel? Not the best novel written by an American. Rather, the best novel written by an American that most clearly reflects the spirit, character and destiny of America, both its good and bad sides, its mistakes and its triumphs. It’s more than a game, of course.”

“Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries and are believed to have died on the same date, 23 April, 1616, although the Spaniard was 16 years Shakespeare’s senior. The film, which has been written and directed by a rising star of Spanish cinema, Ines Paris, suggests that these two extraordinary writers met and influenced each other before Shakespeare finally returned to England and began the most successful phase of his career in London.”

“Wikipedia, as nearly everyone knows by now, is a six-year-old global online encyclopedia in 250 languages that can be added to or edited by anyone. Wikipedia’s goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone on the planet at no cost. Depending on your lights, it is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards. Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying — 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone — and that success has borne an interesting side effect.”

“Pennsylvania libraries are nearly at the bottom of the pile — 43rd nationwide — in the size of financial support from their communities. In a strange way, Andrew Carnegie is among the reasons why. While he was a generous benefactor, giving the cities of Pittsburgh and Allegheny the cash to build handsome library buildings in the 1890s, the buck stopped there.”