Who Pays Blogs
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.
●
●
Mapping Short Story Titles
The B.O.M.M. blog looked at our recent item Best American Short Stories: By the Numbers, in which we crunched some numbers behind the Best American Short Stories series, and created a nifty word map of the short story titles that appeared in the series from 1978 to 2008. “The most frequent word for a title (not including articles and such)? Life. It has appeared 9 times.” If anyone else decides to mine some interesting discoveries from the B.A.S.S. data, let us know.
●
●
The real Daisy Buchanan
“The poor boy losing the rich girl is a common theme in Fitzgerald’s work, and the original model was surely his relationship with Ginerva King.” AKA the real Daisy Buchanan, who, might I note, looks nothing at all like Carey Mulligan.
Private Ennui
Marlon James, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize, believes that writers of color are “pandering to the white woman.” James touched on some related topics in the conversation with novelist Jeanette Winterson that we told you about yesterday.
As It Comes
Recommended Reading: Nicholas Rombes on Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. You could also read S.J. Culver on discovering her work when he was young.
Libraries In Trouble
Since 2003, Spain has seen its “average number of regular readers” climb from 47% (one of the three lowest in the EU) to 60%. During that time, writes Alasdair Fotheringham, the number of library borrowers in the various parts of the country has risen between 50 and 150%. Yet in spite of this burgeoning trend, library budgets are still at risk of further austerity cuts. Meanwhile, almost the exact same thing is happening in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
●
●