On the heels of a New Mexico school district banning Neverwhere because a mother considered it “R-rated,” Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture for the Reading Agency about the importance of libraries and reading for children. “It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different,” he said about banning books.
The “Bad” Author Myth
Tarantino on Writing
Say what you want about Quentin Tarantino; the man thinks like a writer. You can hear him doing so out loud on the current episode of KCRW’s The Treatment, with Elvis Mitchell.
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Red Scare
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism (assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to human progress.” Wait, what? The New York Review of Books reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
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From Musician to Collagist
Musician and Super Bowl bird-flipper M.I.A. will release a 192-page hardcover book this October. M.I.A. will be “an autobiographical monograph in collages.” P.S. How good is the “Bad Girls” video?
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“Emotion, said the monk, is like a storm”
[Very Quick] Recommended Reading: “Negative Emotions” by Lydia Davis
Well, That Explains A Lot of Twitter.
People like to think that the more books they read, the better people they’ll become. But is that really true? The answer’s unclear. But one thing does seem apparent: reading more books might make you better at bullying people.
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Mass(ive) Effect
What effect, if any, are video games having on literature? Tobias Carroll at Hazlitt explores the surprising liminal space between video game narratives and literary fiction. This essay from The Millions is a nice complement.
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Recommended Reading: In her new memoir, Joyce Carol Oates praises Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass as “the singular book that changed my life – that made me yearn to be a writer.”
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As a public school librarian in the states, I am in the unusual position of having to convince educators of the importance of reading. Oh for a Reading Agency here!