A note on influence
Edgar Allen Poe’s House on The Wire
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Steve Jobs Goes Graphic
Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been immortalized in books, documentaries, and TV specials, with rumors that his story might eventually make its way to the big screen. Now you can add graphic novel to that list; on Tuesday PC Magazine noted the release of The Zen of Steve Jobs.
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A History of Pen Names
This week in book-related infographics: “A History of Pen Names,” from Robinson Crusoe to Dr. Seuss to Toni Morrison.
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Cataloguing Twitter (Or Just the Very Best)
James Gleick, writing for the New York Review of Books, looks at how the Library of Congress has begun “stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it” in order to create a modern-day “library of Babel.” I’ll admit that it sounds insane to collect the tweets of ~500 million users, so instead I offer an alternative. Let’s just record everything RT’d by Pentametron2013 for posterity, eh?
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The Nobel Isn’t Everything
Wole Soyinka does not approve of the push for Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize for Literature, and he doesn’t appreciate fan letters asking for his support to that end. “How did creative valuation descend to such banality?” Soyinka remarks in an interview with SaharaReporters. “Do these people know what they’re doing – they are inscribing Chinua’s epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations. I find that disgusting.”
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Poetry of Displacement
Recommended Reading: Mai Der Vang’s striking poem about displacement “Light From a Burning Citadel” at The Missouri Review. “Once this highland was our birthplace. Once we were children of kings.”
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The Klingon Word for Spoon is “baghneQ”
Lapham’s Quarterly has a new podcast about “the weird world of invented languages” such as Klingon, Dothraki, and Esperanto.