This week, the Ransom Center at UT-Austin opened up its archives of the works of J.M. Coetzee. Because the Nobel Prize winner is an alumnus, he says it’s “a privilege to have graduated from being a teaching assistant at The University of Texas to being one of the authors whose papers are conserved here.” (Fun fact: his starting salary was $2,300 a year.)
Class Notes
A Bacon Bookmark
Bacon. Cheese slices. A saw blade. Buttered broccoli. Librarians around the world lament the strangest food (and non-food) items their patrons have used as bookmarks (via The Guardian). Pair with: an essay on librarians, sex, and stereotypes.
“My body belongs to me; / to others its mastery.”
Landays are traditional two-line folk poems, and they are particularly popular among Afghan women these days. Recently Poetry magazine dedicated an issue to the short verses, and Dowser has a behind-the-scenes look at how the issue was put together. Previously, New York Times Magazine caught up with some members of Mirman Baheerm, a women’s literary society based in Kabul.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Crytozoologist
Martin Connelly takes a look at The International Cryptozoology Museum, which is run by Loren Coleman up in Portland, Maine. If you can’t make the pilgrimage yourself (or if you’re just put off by chupacabra taxidermy), you can also get a feel for the study of far out beasts by reading Coleman’s “genre-defining” book, Cryptozoology A to Z.
Big Bird Is Still Employed
Still mourning the end of 2012 Election jokes? The Poetry Foundation is here to help with “Binders Full of Poems by Women.”
The Experiment
“In the first few days of ‘publicly’ reading the book, I only received quizzical stares and saw people putting glasses on or slouching in their seats to better read the cover. It just so happened that it wasn’t until Black History Month that those silent stares turned into vocal encounters and my light commuter reading turned into a bit of a social experiment.” Recommended reading: Lauren A. White’s experience of reading How To Be Black in public.
Back to the Bookstore
The Guardian reports that Kinokuniya, a Japanese book chain, has bought 90 percent of the print run of Haruki Murakami’s latest essay collection, Novelist As a Vocation, to be released September 10th in Japan. The company hopes to bring more customers back into bookstores. Need more Murakami? Read our review of The Strange Library.
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Mr. E.L. James
Neil Leonard, husband of 50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James, is penning a YA novel.
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