Claire of the Sea Light author Edwidge Danticat remarks upon the “split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake” in her interview with Guernica’s Dwyer Murphy. Her latest novel was featured in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
Haiti: Before and After with Edwidge Danticat
Commas, Commas, and More Commas
The outcome of a court judgment concerning a dispute between a dairy company and its delivery drivers hinged on a grammar. Specifically, what does the Oxford comma signify?
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Joyce Works for Google
“The company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed… It is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google.” From The Guardian, a look at “fiction in the age of data saturation,” with a healthy dose of anthropology thrown in just for fun.
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The Ethics of Illegal Downloads
None other than Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times, has decided that illegally downloading an e-book version of a book for which you’ve already paid full price in hardcover is “not unethical… subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.” He adds, “Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology.”
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The Case for “A World Digital Library”
“All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals,” notes Robert Darnton, “because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs. The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds.”
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Copy Craze
“You’re following some cute glyph about smoking, then one about stationary, then dirty dishes and some mischievous cat—then it’s suddenly ‘Not your father’s safari jacket’ followed by pearl puddles, LIBERATOR dildos, Quaker teens, rehab, troubled teens, and more jackets. It’s like a mini-Buñuel movie! And they expect you to keep following along with Malcolm Gladwell, or whoever it is, over there to the left? Why would you? You want to shout, Hey Malcolm, can you shut up about Twitter and explain the neo-surrealist montage unfolding perversely in the margins?” The strange amalgamation that is the magazine ad column.
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Lights Out
Want to turn on your creativity? Turn off the lights. A new study shows that dim lighting “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” which sounds like a great cure for writer’s block if there ever was one.
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Serial
“What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.” An argument for bringing back the serialized novel in the spirit of Dickens, Thackeray and Arthur Conan Doyle from The Washington Post.
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