Over at World Literature Today, Diane Clarke writes against neutrality, capital letters, and easy translation. “I want a poetics of translation that is not just anti-assimilationist.” Pair with this Millions essay about translators at work.
Against Neutrality
Those Silly Bloggers
NYC restaurateur Gabriel Stulman of Little Owl and Joseph Leonard says, “I’m turned off by how people are dining now in this blog-inundated world. Everyone wants to dissect and overanalyze their food and take pictures of it.” (via, thx Emre)
The Best of Gaddis’s Letters
Year In Reading contributor and The End of Oulipo author Scott Esposito has been reading a lot of William Gaddis’s letters recently. Over at his blog, he’s shared his favorite ten passages from Gaddis’s collected correspondence.
Whitman Illuminated
Speaking of innovative publishing, Tin House released a new edition of Whitman‘s “Song of Myself” illustrated by Allen Crawford on May 16th. There’s a book trailer, and selected pages from the finished book can be seen here.
The Klingon Word for Spoon is “baghneQ”
Lapham’s Quarterly has a new podcast about “the weird world of invented languages” such as Klingon, Dothraki, and Esperanto.
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Fictional Texts
“Each imaginary book is a demonstration of fiction’s magic, as an author deposits into a fictional world yet another fictional world, like one universe bubbling out of another.” On Borges and other authors’ fictional texts and his library of imaginary books. Jeff Peer introduces us to Borges as a professor in his review of Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature.
America Central
Newsweek Senior Writer (and Millions contributor) Alexander Nazaryan has a new interview with William T. Vollmann up on Newsweek’s website. To start things off right, he reports that if Vollman were to win the Nobel Prize, he’d enjoy giving a decent chunk of the prize money to prostitutes.
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