The state funds for California’s libraries have been dwindling for the better part of a decade, but now they face total elimination. Put into concrete terms: in the 1999-2000 fiscal year, libraries received $56.8 million from the state; in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, that number was down to $12.9 million; now they’ll receive $0.
The State of the State’s Libraries
Unlocking Agrippa
In 1992, William Gibson published Agrippa, a poem coded on a floppy disk such that after one reading it would destroy itself forever. Quinn DuPont, a PhD student studying cryptography, built an emulation of the self-destructing poem and has a challenge to cyberpunks and cryptographers: be the first person to crack the poem’s code and win a copy of every one of Gibson’s books ever published.
(Do Not) Steal This Book
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about book sales — from what the heck even constitutes a sale, to standard print runs, to author earnings per sale — from Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature.
●
●
The anticipations of a Most Anticipated book
Not every worthy book finds the audience it deserves as quickly as Edan Lepucki’s California. John Warner writes about the long aftermath of finding his debut, The Funny Man, featured in our 2011 Most Anticipated Book Preview: “I wondered, what if? Maybe this was going to be the next phase of my life, and when people asked me what I did, I’d say that I wrote novels.” His new collection of short stories is Tough Day for the Army.
●
●
Allen Ginsberg, Beat Historian
“It’s not often one gets the opportunity to take a course on a major literary movement taught by a founding member of that movement,” but Allen Ginsberg‘s lectures on “the literary history of the Beats” are now available online via Open Culture.
●
●
Excuse this dust.
Have you been reading Michelle Dean’s Saturday History Lessons over at The Rumpus? This weekend she wrote on Dorothy Parker’s ashes, which are, apparently, in Baltimore. Also, this one, on Flannery O’Connor and her best pen pal Betty Hester, is great.
●
●
Combining a Murder Mystery and Immigrant Family Story with Jane Pek
Jane Pek discusses her debut novel, The Verifiers, which follows an amateur sleuth who investigates the potential suitors of lovelorn New Yorkers.
●
●
●