“He was a sassy youngster…[A]s to burning the epistle up or not—it never occurred to me to do anything at all: what the hell did I care whether he was pertinent or impertinent? he was fresh, breezy, Irish: that was the price paid for admission—and enough: he was welcome!” Turns out Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker were pen pals.
“He was a sassy youngster”
Crowdsourcing Translation
Three thousand Russians volunteered to proofread “forty-six thousand eight hundred pages” of Leo Tolstoy’s writings over the course of fourteen days. Soon their efforts will be available online for all to see. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is catching some heat for enlisting the services of unpaid Duolingo students in order to translate site content for Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese readers.
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“yes I said yes I will Yes”
Get your Bloomsday fix with our James Joyce quiz. Or you can celebrate with Emily M. Keeler, The Atlantic, a BBC dramatization, and Colm Tóibín. You can also read an excerpt from Ulysses over at Berfrois. Plus there’s a ‘Ulysses Seen‘ smartphone app (which is viewable online).
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Poetry!
At the recently re-launched Poems Out Loud site, you can see Stanley Kunitz talk about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and hear contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio read their own work.
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A Less Dangerous Game
“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided later, lying in his bed, after they had played several rounds of various games, and didn’t hunt one another at all.” You probably encountered Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game at some point during your educational career — you definitely never came across this “comforting and anodyne” version, though.
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Bethanne Patrick’s Bottom 10 of 2009
Book Studio‘s Bethanne Patrick‘s Top 10 and, perhaps more interestingly, Bottom 10 Books of the Year. Patrick minces no words on Lethem, Kingsolver, Niffenegger, Moore, and Larsson.
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The Idealistic Hero
“What is missing from Testimony is the customary idealistic hero, the one last encountered in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who doesn’t avert his eyes from suffering and sordidness, but who nevertheless is full of hope for a better future. Testimony is a corrective, an anti-epic.” Charles Simić recounts Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative in the NYRB.
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