Following the recent passing of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, The New Statesman republished the author’s London diary, first published by the magazine back in 1958.
Empirical Studies of the Class System
Blake Butler on Submitting Writing
HTMLGiant‘s editor Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year, has compiled a list of things he’s learned from submitting his writing.
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Holiday links
We’ve been back from our holiday travels for a few days, and I’ve finally had some time to catch up with some online reading. Here are some articles and links that caught my eye. (Several of these come from Arts and Letters Daily)From Scientific American, a look at last year’s tsunami and how scientists have used this real life event to validate and augment various previously untested theories about these rare, cataclysmic events.The 2005 Dubious Data Awards: the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University highlights several examples of overhyped news stories based on dubious numbers.From Wired: Will the impending bird-flu pandemic be a global version of “the boy who cried wolf?” Scientists are trying to assess the real danger using supercomputers to play out fantastically complicated simulations that remind me of SimCity.In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley “reconsiders” C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower saga. He suggests Beat to Quarters as the best in the series.I’ve definitely become very interested in the business of newspapers in the last few years. Mike Hughlett’s article in the Chicago Tribune is a little “inside baseball,” but it lays out how important classified ads are to newspapers, and explains why newspapers aren’t as imperiled in the in online classified arena as some might suggest.Another tough business is opening a coffee shop. Michael Idov shares the harrowing details of his experience at Slate.A no-frills list of the bestselling books from 1900 to 1998, year by year.
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NYPL Forgives Late Fees
The New York Public Library is granting amnesty to 143,000 kids’ late fees. $1 will be knocked off each kid’s fee for every 15 minutes they spend in the library’s Summer Reading Program.
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The Age-Old Tradition
Scientists are using x-ray to read fragments of 1,300-year-old manuscripts that have been reused as bookbindings. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
No Guarantees At All
The Paris Review once referred to Roberto Calasso as “a literary institution of one.” Calasso stopped by The New York Times to answer a few questions about publication and Italy in anticipation of his forthcoming memoir, The Art of the Publisher.
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Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More Time
Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it’s not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that “the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.”
Writing Is a Dangerous Pursuit
“We might not win. And yet we have to commit ourselves to the struggle, because there’s nothing else besides struggle.” Toni Morrison talks about literature and activism with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sonia Sanchez.