At The Rumpus, Suzanne Koven talks with Eve Ensler, better known as the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues. Among other things, they talk about her new book, In the Body of the World.
In the Mind of the Author
‘Bout Goddamn Time
In The Guardian, Sam Leith reviews Holy Sh*t: A History of Swearing, a new book by Melissa Mohr. In it, Mohr argues that swearing just ain’t what it ****ing used to be, man.
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Nabokov’s Notes
Vladimir Nabokov spent twenty years translating “the first and fundamental Russian novel,” Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. His battle with the text sparked an intellectual debate with his former friend, Edmund Wilson. The Paris Review has his notes. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s thoughts on Lolita.
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Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer
In a TED Talk, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer works. You can learn “surprising things” from 500 billion words, a string of characters which put together “would stretch from here to the Moon and back ten times over.”
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Git Yer Free E-Books Here
Free e-book bibliophiles rejoice, you now have yet another place to download public domain e-books. The Digital Reader reports on Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-based project to “produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks.” Pair with our post from a decade back about Project Gutenberg’s pubbing of “2 B R 0 2 B,” a “lost” story by Kurt Vonnegut.
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The Poetry of Borders
Over at the Southern Humanities Review, Javier Zamora, Veronica Marquez, and others share their poems in a special feature for undocumented writers. Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
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Gass Goes Digital
Stephen Schenkenberg paired a previously unpublished 15,000-word essay by William H. Gass with a series of abstract photographs by Michael Eastman, and he’s released the entire package as an interactive iPad e-book.
Our young robot overlords
Looks like our robot overlord is going to be a 13-year-old boy: the Turing Test has been passed for the first time by a bot simulating a preteen, making history for artificial intelligence research and teenagers alike. “Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” researchers explained.
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