October 25, 2012
Barnes & Noble announced on Wednesday that PIN pad devices in sixty-three of its stores had been hacked, compromising customers’ credit-card information.
In an effort to reduce children’s exposure to smoking, a Canadian publisher has removed references to Santa Claus’s pipe from a new version of “‘A Visit from St. Nicholas,” drawing criticism from anti-censorship groups.
The Whiting Foundation has announced the winners of its 2012 literary award.
“The content of the book—the nature of its characters, and the lethal cocktail of psychology, destiny, and coincidence that Emily Brontë has brewed to ensure her protagonists’ downfall—is exceedingly difficult to capture.” Francine Prose on the trouble with adapting “Wuthering Heights” for the screen.
At Popsci, Dan Nosowitz predicts that “the iPad Mini will be for literary snobs, and the Kindle Fire will be for dumb-dumbs who read airport garbage books.”
Starbucks’ library-themed pop-up shop in Tokyo.
October 24, 2012
Last May, a piece I wrote for the magazine about genre fiction’s new-found respectability caused the digital highway to buckle ever so slightly. Despite my professed admiration for many genre writers, I was blasted for thinking that literary fiction is superior to genre fiction, and for not noticing that the zeitgeist had come and gone while I was presumably immersed in “The Golden Bowl.” Apparently, the dichotomy between genre fiction and literary fiction isn’t just old news—it’s no news, it’s finis, or so the critics on Slate’s Culture Gabfest and the folks who run other literary Web sites informed me. The science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that literature “is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.” Is that so? A novel by definition is “written art”? You know, I wrote a novel once, and I’m pretty sure that Le Guin would change her mind if she read it.
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October 24, 2012
A new Pew study shows that sixteen to twenty-nine year olds are still reading books and using libraries, despite knowing how to use computers.
A look at the women who have shaped Poetry magazine during its hundred-year-long history.
Researchers at Oxford University think they are close to cracking the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system.
“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you / in spite of everything, / don’t do it.” Charles Bukowski’s “so you want to be a writer.”
“A language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.” Arika Okrent on Johann Schleyer, a German priest who created Volapük, a heavily umlauted universal language, in response to a calling from God.
A Beijing newspaper reports that China plans to turn the Nobel winner Mo Yan’s hometown into the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.”
The demographics of Middle Earth.
October 23, 2012
In the novel “Jerusalem,” by the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, there is a character named Mylia, who suffers from schizophrenia. One of the manifestations of Mylia’s illness is a strangely intimate experience of, and relationship with, inanimate objects. She is, for example, disgusted by shoes because of their dumb subservience to people, their total self-abnegation as things to be possessed and used. “Not even a dog,” she reflects, “was as submissive as a shoe.” She is also deeply disturbed by eggs: “Eggs, all eggs, contained a kind of concrete, material altruism that Mylia couldn’t find in anything else in the world. Eggs appear because they want to disappear.” This anthropomorphic intimacy leads her to handle things in a way that appears somehow unseemly:
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October 23, 2012
The Imaginarium, the performance-capture studio behind “Rise Of the Planet Of The Apes,” is planning a film adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
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October 22, 2012
The first best-selling novel I ever edited was Rona Jaffe’s notorious “The Best of Everything.” That was back in 1958, and it’s just made a comeback—as the basis of a slick and even touching stage version at a small downtown theatre. Who’d have thunk it? Not even Rona (alas, dead), despite her literary aspirations.
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October 22, 2012
The Man Asian Literary Prize is in search of a new sponsor after losing its funding from the Man Group.
“A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers.” Joe Queenan on reading over six thousand books.
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October 22, 2012
This week’s story, “Ox Mountain Death Song,” is set in the Ox Mountains, with their “infinite thousands” of hiding places, which run along the border of Sligo and Mayo counties, in Ireland. Is this a landscape you know well?
It is. The Ox rise about forty miles from where I live, in the swamplands of south Sligo. I go cycling out there. And I’ve been getting a weird buzz off the Ox for quite some time now. They’re not very big, as mountains go, but as you approach, pedalling heroically into the skinning gales and torrential downpours of high summer in Ireland, they do seem to loom in a moody and forbidding way. There’s an odd feeling as you ascend. And one of my fundamental beliefs as a writer is that human feeling doesn’t just reside in humans but it settles into places, too. Often it’s bad feeling—a melancholy, or paranoia, or fearfulness. Different places have different resonances. And on the Ox, I picked up this strange feeling as I cycled by. It was screaming “Story!” at me and it drew me back, repeatedly. I made a draft of the story on location out there over three days last June—I was stopping the bike to scribble down notes, and trying out the voices, aloud, as I cycled along. The rhythm of the bike’s movement was fundamental to the process, somehow. The eerie whirring of the spokes, I believe, got into the prose. I went to swim from the beaches of the coastal towns named in the story and lay in the icy water and tried to work out the terms of the narrative. I accept that these might sound like fairly esoteric mechanics for the making of a short story, but there you go.
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October 20, 2012
Notes from New Yorker staff members on their literary engagements of the week.
My husband and I were waiting on the subway platform on a recent Saturday, paging through the Times and discussing a movie we wanted to see, when a stranger approached.
“What movie were you talking about?” he asked. He was clean-shaven and had a wide, polite smile. My husband answered him. They chatted briefly. I was too rattled to speak. I ride the subway every day, and I relish the privacy it offers. It is a space where you’re permitted to guiltlessly ignore the people around you—even if those people are just inches from your face. I found it oddly terrifying when my right to commute in private was taken away from me.
In “Privacy,” the essayist Garret Keizer writes about our rights and expectations regarding privacy. It is a slim volume (the book is part of the Big Ideas, Small Books series by Picador), but covers an expansive amount of material. Keizer, who considers privacy to be a basic human right, investigates the socioeconomic, racial, and gender issues that determine who has access to privacy and who does not. He spends an admirably small amount of time discussing the Internet and reality television. “I think that a preoccupation with devices distracts us from the major issues—in the same way as social networking sites distract us from our lives,” he writes. This logic explains why the Obama Administration can be so Internet-savvy while responding to so few F.O.I.A. requests. Instead, Keizer writes about the legal history of privacy (the word was first mentioned in court in 1880), the Patriot Act, and our current obsession with transparency.
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October 19, 2012
Today I encountered fifteen horses marching down the avenue. They were many shades of brown and the riders wore black coats, with long gold swords dangling from their waists, which matched their boot spurs and the chin straps on their helmets. I heard the horses’ hooves striking the pavement long before they were visible, and when they stopped at an intersection, those of us on the sidewalk, and in cars and on motorcycles, couldn’t help but pause and admire them, smiling as the wind played with their brushed tails. High up, the handsome riders conversed among themselves, and when the streetlight changed, one at the front lifted his arm, and they all crossed the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Luxembourg Gardens. Later, returning from the post office, I encountered the horses again in the cold, bright air, and their phalanx seemed to me like a poetry muscle exercising itself to remain strong, the precise movements of each horse and rider like the line of a poem moving across a blank page, representing the highest degree of control—of selection and
omission—as language is assembled into art.
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