In both pizza and geological terms, the East Coast is known for its thin crust.
On Yesterday’s Earthquake
Before “Once Upon A Time”
George Dobbs explores the history of some common cliches for The Airship and makes an elegant argument for being aware of overused phrasing: “The worst fiction might never go beyond widely used tropes, but the best fiction starts with an awareness of them.” We agree, and also hope never to read “It was a dark and stormy night…” again.
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Happy Birthday, Joseph Heller
“The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.” Happy Birthday Joseph Heller, author of the anti-war classic Catch-22, born this day in 1923 in Coney Island, New York.
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Apply for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship!
February 1st is the application deadline for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing. It’s a two year post-graduate fellowship that offers $40,000 per year while you work on completing a second book or starting a first. Apply now!
“There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention.”
If you’ve finished reading David Mitchell’s latest short story – which was published on Twitter last week and then ran on our site five days ago – you’ll appreciate Ian Crouch’s look at its greater meaning, and what it could mean for Twitter as a whole.
Summer Belongs To Someone Else
Recommended Reading: This story by John Patrick McHugh at Granta Magazine. Do yourself a favor and check out this one while you’re at it.
Doing More With Less
Nollywood is the name given to Nigeria’s $500 million movie business. For about the same amount of money that was spent on the promotion and production of James Cameron’s Avatar, Nollywood is able to churn out a thousand films each year, trailing only Bollywood and Hollywood in terms of revenue.
“Jeux de mot-dièse”
The Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme – the division of the French government responsible for preserving the integrity of the Gallic language – ruled last week that enough is enough when it comes to “hashtag.” They feel the word is just too English for the banks of the Seine. They recommend instead using the decidedly softer “mot-dièse” (pro: ‘Mo-Dee-YEZ’). Previously the group asked residents to replace “email” with “courriel.”