“Of all the literary genres, poetry has proved the most resistant to digital technology, not for stodgy cultural reasons but for tricky mechanical ones.” Looks like that might be changing, however, as Open Road releases Flow Chart, Your Name Here and 15 other John Ashbery digital poetry collections.
Ashbery Goes Digital
Building the Library of Utopia
Google ran into a wall of litigation when it tried to create a public digital archive of every book in the world. Now a team of academics is taking on the challenge. Nicholas Carr examines whether Robert Darton and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society can succeed where Silicon Valley failed. Also be sure to check out our review of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
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Harry Potter and the Teflon Cloak
We've been jealous of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak since The Sorcerer's Stone. Now scientists can make an invisibility cloak in 15 minutes with Teflon. We'll never get our Hogwarts acceptance letter, but this is pretty close.
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The Unbearable Finitude of Reading
Beginning with the same premise—one can only read so many books in a given lifetime—two authors write very different articles: Maria Bustillos lists the recommendations of George Orwell, Henry Miller, and John Waters that she's followed in an effort to maximize her short reading life. Marc Wortman wonders if authors are being paid by the page and, given our short lives, whether we should even bother with the behemoth volumes coming out recently.
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Song of Myself
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell delves into the history of the self-interview, which you can find many examples of over at The Nervous Breakdown. Mark cites examples of self-interviews by prominent writers, including Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Year in Reading alum John Banville.
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Adam Bomb and Friends
Max Axe here. I was seven years old when the Garbage Pail Kids debuted and quickly became all the rage, so news that this Garbage Pail Kids book - with an introduction by creator Art Spiegelman - is hitting bookstores now is transporting me back to my schoolyard days. (Also, how did I not know until now that Spiegelman was behind GPK?)
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Now nothing beneath the bad smelling sky
The Lorax has been stolen from the Dr. Suess memorial sculpture garden.