There’s an app called Shatoetry and, yes, it was created by William Shatner. Its purpose? Why, as “a sort of magnetic poetry assembler where every word is read in the offbeat actor’s distinctive tone,” of course.
Shatoetry
Competence without comprehension
If you read one piece on early computer scientist Alan Turing that’s come out in celebration of his 100th birthday last Saturday (if you were wondering about Friday’s Google Doodle) you might do very well to make it this one in the Atlantic on how his reading of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution influenced his work and continues to shape the way we work with computers. It’s also about the limits of artificial intelligence.
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Abundance and Awe
Recommended reading: Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes about the pleasures and “democratic awe” of Whitman‘s Specimen Days. Pair with our own Michael Bourne‘s “Embracing the Other I Am: or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life.”
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Justice and Prayer
“Dear publisher, I am sorry if I do so few of these stories justice. Someone else surely will. I don’t know what justice for a book is but I think I saw it as I prayed over this one.” Matthew Jakubowski reviews Diane Williams’ latest collection Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine at Minor Literature[s]. You could also read his reviews of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler and Margriet de Moor’s The Storm at The Millions.
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Edgar Award Nominations
The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Awards [pdf]. Nominees include Tana French for Faithful Place and Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon for Zora and Me (featuring Zora Neale Hurston, girl detective).
The Thirsty North
Newsflash: people in cold states drink a lot more than people in warm states.
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Library in the Cloud
Amazon has unveiled its Kindle Lending Library. Prime subscribers can now “choose from thousands of books to borrow for free including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates.”
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Adam Bomb and Friends
Max Axe here. I was seven years old when the Garbage Pail Kids debuted and quickly became all the rage, so news that this Garbage Pail Kids book – with an introduction by creator Art Spiegelman – is hitting bookstores now is transporting me back to my schoolyard days. (Also, how did I not know until now that Spiegelman was behind GPK?)
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Su Hui’s Masterpiece Palindrome
Chinese poet Su Hui composed an 841-character array in the fourth century that can be read forward, backward, horizontally, diagonally, and vertically. The poem, entitled “Xuanji Tu,” can be read in 2,848 different ways as a result.
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