“Among their other contributions to American life are words that some of the Beats marshaled on behalf of wild places. Kerouac, inspired by Snyder’s rapture about a summer spent in the clouds, followed him as a lookout to an area that eventually became North Cascades National Park in Washington State.” Over at The New York Times, Timothy Egan takes a look at poetry’s long, linked history with our national parks.
Beat the Drum of Conservation
Library Extension
A simple web browser extension will tell you if the book you’re reading about online is available at your local library. Currently a Chrome version is available, and Firefox is on the way.
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Your Life Will Change
“Your shipment of personal copies will never arrive. Your publisher will not be able to track their fate, nor replace them. A week will pass and you will wander into the animal shelter at a nearby strip mall and find a dog cage lined with the urine-soaked pages of your book. Your eyes will meet the eyes of the miniature schnauzer that resides in your shredded work. You’ll think: this is fate. But the adoption center won’t approve your application because you can’t claim any substantial income.” Electric Literature has compiled the “The Ten Ways Your Life Will Change After You Publish Your First Book,” so you can’t say you weren’t warned.
The Odyssey, Mapped
An interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer tracks the winding, often circuitous journey taken by Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
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No More Nice Girls
n+1’s Research Collective has posted the introduction to Ellen Willis’s No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and plans to post a series of essays by the seamless activist and writer– “Her refusal to subsume her personality to a movement, or to ignore the things that were important to her, remains an inspiration.”
Telling a beautiful lie
Chris Jones’s latest feature for Esquire wraps a copyright infringement case up in a meditation on the power of magic, the will to believe and the essence of the delight we can find in art. Warning: may lead you down an endless Penn & Teller YouTube rabbit hole.
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Amazon: criticism you can count on
A study of the top 100 non-fiction titles between 2004 and 2007, and the major media and Amazon reviews for each title, yields some fascinating results: “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”
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