A Betsy Lerner follower asks Betsy what to do when you hit the wall at page 60 of your novel–of every novel you try to write. Betsy’s answer? Try novellas.
Start Something New
All The Single Horse Flies
Blue Ivy was the one who made the headlines, but she’s not the only Beyoncé Knowles story this week. Australian researcher Bryan Lessard has paid tribute to the singer by incorporating her name into the binomial nomenclature of an extremely rare horse fly. When asked why he did this, Lennard responded that the fly’s gold-colored abdomen made it “the all time diva of flies.”
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Japanese E-Book Aversion
It’s hard to believe that a country with video games like this would be slow to adopt a new technology, but a recent survey indicates that Japanese people are not keen on e-books.
Poetry is Back (or it Never Left)
Down Goes the Stout
In what was surely one of the most fun experiments of all time, a team of Irish scientists have finally figured out why Guinness stout bubbles fall instead of rise.
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I will tell you this Rosalina, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy.
From Werner Herzog’s letter to Rosalina, the woman he employs to keep his house: “Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while organizing the recycling, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.”
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Curiosities: Santa Nutcracker
On the occasion of Scribner’s publication of the “Restored Edition” of A Moveable Feast, Gioia Diliberto, biographer of Ernest Hemingway’s wife Hadley, writes of her discovery of the Hadley Hemingway tapes.Sarah Schmelling’s McSweeney’s piece “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)” has spawned a book Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook, the canon retold in social networking parlance.Speaking of the canon, The Second Pass plays devil’s advocate and tells us which of history’s most praised books are best avoided. (We will pass over in silence the inclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude.)Mark Athitakis writes about the National Book Award in 1980, “an interesting time for the prize.” The previous year, publishers pulled out of the awards, contending according to an NYT article, “the awards favored little-read books.” (This criticism resurfaced in 2004.) After 1980, the festivities ballooned to eight fiction categories before eventually being scaled back in subsequent years. (via Maud)In Slate, Nathaniel Rich wonders why “the most peaceful people on earth [Scandinavians] write the greatest homicide thrillers.”The “Significant Objects project,” in which worthless trinkets are sold on eBay along with original fiction written about said worthless trinkets, has launched. Participants include Curtis Sittenfeld, Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, Sam Lipsyte, and a few dozen others. The eBay auctions can be found here.
It’s just not the same, is it?
Don’t like the idea of reading e-books to your kids? Turns out you’re not alone — a new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor says (pdf) that seventy percent of parents who own iPads prefer to use print books when reading to their children. If you read these articles, you might have seen this coming.
Fail Better
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