“Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle — incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
The Great Terry Castle
J.R.R. Tolkien Traced “Morse” to “Walrus”
Jonathan Dent offers a fascinating look at one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most challenging assignments for the Oxford English Dictionary. Apparently as a young philologist, Tolkien was tasked with tracing the etymology of “walrus” – a tricky word “of disputed origin that had all but entirely replaced the earlier English name morse since its first appearance in English in the late 1600s.”
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If Shakespeare Was a Programmer
"While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise—a matter of following rules—it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive.... With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language." Angus Croll imagines Shakespeare as a programmer in a piece for Quartz and in his book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript.
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Abundance and Awe
Recommended reading: Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes about the pleasures and "democratic awe" of Whitman's Specimen Days. Pair with our own Michael Bourne's "Embracing the Other I Am: or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life."
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The Two Percent
What would happen if two percent of the world's population disappeared overnight? HBO's new teaser for its adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers asks us to contemplate that question. From what we see so far, it looks terrifying. The series premieres on June 15.
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Kindred
The new novel by Colm Tóibín draws largely from the author’s memories of his father passing away when he was young. In a Guardian essay, the author writes about his discovery that literature can be a vessel for grief, with a nod to the writer and Dublin mainstay Mary Lavin. If you’d like to learn more about Tóibín's fiction, you can read our pieces on his books.
Using Neuroscience To Study Art
Dutch researchers are using moistened electrode caps to measure the brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response and facial expressions on an author and fifty of his readers. They hope to find patterns “that may help illuminate links between the way art is created and enjoyed, and possibly the nature of creativity itself.”
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