First it was Pebble Beach, and now they want our movies. After years of bad Hollywood remakes of good Japanese movies, turnabout is fair play.
Coming to a theater near Tokyo
“Swamp Fuschia”
Scandal at the Oxford English Dictionary! Robert Burchfield’s efforts in the 70s and 80s to delete words from the dictionary based on their foreign origins have been uncovered.
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Murakami on 1Q84
A blogger translates a long Murakami interview about 1Q84 (scroll down for parts I, II, and III). (via)
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Ghosts in the Stacks
A voracious reader named “Chuck Finley” was such a prolific library patron that he singlehandedly increased a Florida branch’s circulation by 3.9%. But there’s a problem: he’s not real. (h/t Kirstin Butler.)
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Let Us Praise James Agee
“Every sense cleared about three hundred percent and stood up on its hind legs waving its feelers.” Eighty years ago, James Agee got an assignment that entered him into history, though not during his lifetime. Let us now celebrate Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. See also: our essay on famous artist-writer collaborations, like Agee’s with Walker Evans.
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Mapping Short Story Titles
The B.O.M.M. blog looked at our recent item Best American Short Stories: By the Numbers, in which we crunched some numbers behind the Best American Short Stories series, and created a nifty word map of the short story titles that appeared in the series from 1978 to 2008. “The most frequent word for a title (not including articles and such)? Life. It has appeared 9 times.” If anyone else decides to mine some interesting discoveries from the B.A.S.S. data, let us know.
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Lost and Found and Lost
Recommended Reading: On translation and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, author of Cré na Cille, which is widely believed to be the greatest Irish-language novel of the twentieth century.
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