You may have heard (via this site or elsewhere) that Harold Bloom has a new book out. In the Times Sunday Book Review, Cynthia Ozick gives her take, identifying the critic’s use of the phrase “without precedent” as key to understanding his theory. You could also read Matt Hanson on Bloom’s classic The Anatomy of Influence.
Daemon Days
True Tragedy
“The way this propaganda works is you take something insane and wrap it in a little bit of truth, and then all those people swallow it because it’s wrapped in a little bit of truth.” Columbia Journalism Review talks to the victims of fake news, from Sandy Hook parents to election overseers. Also worth thinking about in this context, the American usage of modern English.
McSweeney’s 2.0
Version 2 of McSweeney’s quirky iPhone app includes an ebookstore with custom-designed ebooks. “Whereas most ebooks have weird line breaks, stretched type and clunky fonts, ours are actually designed so they look just as they do in print – clean and beautiful.”
Literature Isn’t Publishing
“In re-organizing the priorities of book publishing—by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as a way to make great books possible rather than the point—indie presses aren’t just becoming the places where the best books are published; they’re already there.” Over at The Atlantic, Nathan Scott McNamara writes on why American publishing needs indie presses. For more of his writing, check out his essay on Denis Johnson for The Millions.
a multitude of drops
There is a very long trailer for the Cloud Atlas movie, which comes out in the fall. Unfortunately, Kevin Bacon isn’t in it.
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Discovering and Studying Light Warlpiri
While working with Australia’s Lajamanu Aboriginal population in remote sections of the Tanami Desert, linguist Carmel O’Shannessy identified “a [new] language system, independent of … other languages” spoken by about 300 people. Since her initial discovery in the late 1990s, O’Shannessy has studied the language and its grammatical structure, and now her findings have been published this month in the journal Language (PDF).
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Booksellers React to Borders’ Bankruptcy
Half of all restaurants that open close,” WORD owner Christine Onorati says. On the other hand, Red Lemonade publisher Richard Nash hopes former Borders employees can find ways to continue “operating as the matchmakers of the book ecosystem.”