Literature
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Presenting a wide range of literature, this article explores the state of art in book research, paying particular attention to John B. Thompson’s interpretation of digital transformations within the book industry, as depicted in Books in the Digital Age (2005). Claiming that Thompson’s analyses are one–sided, the article applies alternative perspectives and a model of a text cycle, contending that the diminishing role of paper in text production and text distribution makes the dominant position of printed books particularly vulnerable to advances in digital reading technologies.
Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google and the long tail | Hillesund | First Monday
Libraries and Manuscripts
Oral Literature
The earliest book discovered in which appeared indicia which may properly be termed marks of quotation was printed in 1516 at Strasbourg, Alsace (then in Germany), by Mathias Schurer. It was “De Vitis Sophistarum” by Flavius Philostratus. The marks consisted of two commas in the left hand margin of each page outside the regular type measure. They were placed at the beginning of each line in which a quoted passage appeared, and were evidently added after the page was set up, because their alignment varies greatly. ☛ Concerning Quotation Marks by Douglas C.
The origin and development of the quotation mark
Excerpt: 'The Book of Genesis: A Biography' by Ronald Hendel
Noah’s Offering , Francesco Castiglione, 17th C From The Comedy of the Real : One honest response to the lunacy of the world is to laugh. Laughter relieves anxiety and fear, and it pokes holes in the pretensions of the powerful. In medieval times, humor was often coarse and obscene, and the more effective because of it. Luther’s rough handling of his opponents is rooted in this medieval tradition.
by Maria Popova “Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.” Why do writers — great, beloved, timeless writers — write? George Orwell had his four motives .
Henry Miller’s Reflections on Writing
“I have tried to keep diaries before but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.” John Steinbeck made this entry in a ledger he used to track his progress on "The Grapes of Wrath." If we pine for a golden age of diary keeping, let’s indeed be honest: the pens and notebooks of the past inspired a truth no more — and no less — pure than the digital tools of today. While we romanticize diaries as unmediated transcriptions of thought and feeling, they have really always been a forum for self-creation. E.
Digital and Paper Diaries Are Written for an Imagined Audience - Room for Debate
by Maria Popova “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks , I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’ s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem ( public library — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that.
Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook
Fifty-odd years ago I was asked to review a book about Shakespeare by an aged professor who claimed that a career spent largely in teaching Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent. There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another of which the primary motive was vanity and an understandable fear of oblivion.
Frank Kermode · Writing about Shakespeare has his say · LRB 9 December 1999
A fraction of a poem’s power resides in words, the remainder belongs to the spirit that moves through them. Poetry: the native tongue of hysterics – adolescents and mystics, alike. Bow so low and you kiss the sky. There are many degrees of madness. Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature are to name but a few.
23 Aphorisms by Yahia Lababidi
Penguin and Random House may merge, but the power lies elsewhere | Philip Jones | Comment is free
'Amazon controls 90% of the ebook market in the UK, and close to 40% of sales of all books.' Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian A merger of Random House and Penguin would create a £2.5bn trade publisher – by some distance the biggest ever seen. Authors such as E L James, Salman Rushdie, John le Carre, Pippa Middleton, and Jamie Oliver may become bedfellows. No wonder agents and authors are using words like "scary" and "sad" in reaction to the news. But this is a consolidation driven not by authors, but by big tech giants, such as Amazon, and Apple, on whose platforms book publishers must now play.
15 Postcards from Famous Authors
Summer may seem like the ideal postcard-writing season, what with cruises and camp, but we’ve always been most inspired to write them in the fall, when the leaves are changing and we’re feeling wistful. So to amp up that wistful feeling a bit — and since as you’ve probably noticed, we just can’t get enough of ogling literary ephemera — we went on the hunt for interesting postcards written by famous authors, from Jack Kerouac to Franz Kafka to Rainer Maria Rilke. After the jump, admire the penmanship, doodles, and forceful words of a few of your favorite authors, and be sure to link us to any interesting literary postcards we missed in the comments.
Paris Review
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Manhattan apartment is quiet, classy, tasteful. It is a symphony of stillness and neutrals in stark contrast to the constant motion, precise convictions, and easy chatter of the man who inhabits it. He apologizes for having nothing to offer but ice water, but is generous and forthright in his conversation. Mendelsohn is the author of two memoirs, The Elusive Embrace and The Lost , as well as a translation of the poems of C.P.
Why Does Everyone Love It But Me? An Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn
Every Book I’m Shufflin’
Card from A Shufflebook, by Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof, 1970 by Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort Introduction The paper formulates the category “shuffle literature” to help reveal important qualities of certain intriguing works of fiction and poetry. We show how unusual formal and material aspects of these literary works interact with one another, revealing new things about aspects of literature that have been gaining scholarly interest and have increasingly attracted readers.John Preston From Chapter Six : The Gentrification of Our Literature The first gay book I ever saw was called Cylce Suck . It was on a shelf at The Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher Street in 1975, next to some mimeographed pamphlets with titles like “The Woman-Identified Woman.” From the beginning, I have always known that this is as it should be. Separating distinctions between the sexually explicit and the politically necessary would never made sense.
Excerpt: 'The Gentrification of the Mind' by Sarah Schulman
A Critic's Manifesto: The Intersection of Expertise and Taste
In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a teen-ager and had fantasies of growing up to be a writer, I didn’t dream of being a novelist or a poet. I wanted to be a critic. I thought criticism was exciting, and I found critics admirable. This was because I learned from them.Los Angeles Review of Books - Cogito Ergo Boom
REBORN (2008), THE FIRST volume of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, took her from precocious teenager to the brink of massive success — her publication of the essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 — and documented her intellectual and sexual awakenings. There, we meet Sontag in 1947, aged 14, declaring, "I believe that the only difference between human beings is intelligence." We witness her acute mind develop through traditional education (perfunctorily at North Hollywood High School, more rigorously at UC Berkeley, and, most thrillingly, at the University of Chicago) and through the experiences of a teenager and a young woman willing her life to happen. That Sontag happens to be bisexual affects her narrative of self-fashioning, but does not determine it.Oulipo
Prelim Ext English Gothic Literature
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry
Prose
Leah Price