The Atlantic interviews Erin Gruwell, a teacher whose methods for teaching her students about prejudice became the basis of a book (and subsequent movie) called The Freedom Writers. Named after a group of bus-riding civil rights activists, the students in her classes wrote lengthy journal entries — many of them relating to their own personal traumas — in order to compare them with diaries by historical figures. Writing journals, Gruwell says, helped her students learn to like schoolwork.
Reasons Not to Throw Out Your Diary
Wordless Novels
"There is a saying that has become a cliché: 'Pictures speak louder than words.' But sometimes, a picture can speak louder than words because it contains a profound silence. It’s what a picture does not say that can often make it loud. What is, after all, a wordless novel but a novel devoted to the message of silence?" On Frans Masereel's My Book of Hours, a wordless novel in woodcuts. For another, lighter perspective on the power of picture books, pair with Jacob Lambert's "Yet Again, I Ask: Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?"
Lispector Inspector
The new issue of The New York Review of Books is out. A highlight, as usual, is Michael Wood, who does a better job than we did with Inherent Vice. But those of us on this side of the pay wall will have to make do with Lorrie Moore's intriguing essay on Clarice Lispector.
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Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?
"6 Reasons We're In Another 'Book-Burning' Period In History" is not about the destruction of books based on content or community objections; it's about the destruction of books because libraries (and sometimes bookstores) don't know what to do with them. We also had a little something to say about the topic.
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“Can you lend me [Goethe’s] Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid” -Beethoven
Booktryst offers a peek at famed German novelist and (apparently) amateur physicist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colors, revealing Goethe as a sort of proto-Kandinsky.
J.E. Fishman on The New York Times
On The Nervous Breakdown this week, J.E. Fishman considers the book review practices of The New York Times: "My view is very much eastern, very much old school, where a book review from the Times was the only sure sign that an author had arrived. But maybe it’s time to rethink that, and this rethinking has been long overdue."
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Florida’s Poet Laureate
David Axelrod makes the case for Florida to establish a four-year, renewable position as state poet laureate. With any luck, the program could begin by June 1. Florida has been absent a state poet since Edmund Skellings passed away in August, 2012
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Pamela or Plath?
I’m disappointed that I was only able to get 8/12 correct on the Guardian’s “Who’s the Poet: Pamela Anderson or Sylvia Plath” quiz, but I’m consoling myself with the fact that the 50% is the average.
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