The Google Voice service does more than rout calls, voicemails, and provide transcriptions of voicemail messages. It also creates poetry. When reading over the typos and imperfections in his voicemails from Google Voice, Richard Eskow writes for 3 Quarks Daily, “I see an authorial sensibility taking form, like a face emerging from a cloud bank. These transcriptions can be read as poetry.”

Eskow provides a few examples, including this one:

Love Begins a Picture

Hi Cat, I could possibly do in the morning actually in the morning
on the way
so I could meet me in the morning

Anyway, just check back with me man and I will go from there.
Love begins a picture and I'll talk to you real soon.

Source:  3 Quarks Daily  

Here in the dreary depths of midwinter, a mood of melancholic gloom often prevails—and so, James Kidd chirpily announces in The Independent, “there has never been a more appropriate moment to explore the darkest corners of your bookshelves and wallow in some truly miserable literature to enhance those winter blues.”

Kidd pronounces Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a titan of doom lit, “a bona fide contender for the title of Saddest Novel Ever Written. … In a shade over 300 pages, he conjures environmental desolation and physical deprivation and human degradation, not to mention the most poignant father-son relationship committed to paper.”

Other notable titles on Kidd’s list:

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx: A yearning tale of cowboy meets cowboy, cowboy loses cowboy, that ends with Ennis Del Mar’s tight-lipped expression of stoic nihilism: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene: Perhaps the most piercing of all anthems to doomed love … which begins on a dreary January day: “It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

Animal Farm by George Orwell … for the pathos of Boxer’s “disappearance” and blunt prose such as: “Muriel was dead; Bluebell, Jessie and Pincher were dead. Jones too was dead—he had died in an inebriates’ home in another part of the country.”

Speaking of dying in an inebriates’ home, I’ve also got some favorite poems for relentlessly bleak winter days. Macabre poet/illustrator Edward Gorey’s tale The Iron Tonic opens with the stupendously grim rhyme:

The people at the grey hotel

Are either aged or unwell.

The guests who chose to stay aloof

Lie wrapped in rugs upon the roof.

Then it goes on to conjure some truly chilling horrors of winter:

It’s known the skating pond conceals

A family of enormous eels.

and

The infant dead beside the path

Escaped the orphanage’s wrath.

Finally, when the sky turns to slate for days on end and people with seasonal affective disorder starting fidgeting with the gun cabinet key, I can’t shake the memorable opening stanza of “Snow-Bound” by John Greenleaf Whittier:

The sun that brief December day

Rose cheerless over hills of gray,

And, darkly circled, gave at noon

A sadder light than waning moon.

Happy reading.

 (Thanks, Arts & Letters Daily.)

Source: The Independent

Image by karpov the wrecked train, licensed under Creative Commons.

Now that corporations are more like people—as many argue the Supreme Court decided in the recent Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case—corporations may soon want the right to vote. Corporations may also want to marry, run for office, and be counted in the census. Writing for McSweeney’s, Steven Seidenberg writes imagines a dystopian world where corporations are treated like people, and this happens in 2028:

Winning 72.1% of the popular vote, California Governor Mickey Mouse is elected President of the United States. He runs weakest among men (garnering just 39% of the vote) and women (45%). However, he is carried to victory by his strength in other key demographic groups: corporations (67%), cartoons (68%), lobbying groups (73%), copyrighted film scores (78%) and online avatars (81%).

If anything, all the chatter over the Apple Tablet (I refuse to speak its name) only amplifies the question that has been haunting the publishing industry for a decade or more: What does the future hold for e-books? Canada’s Quill & Quire reports on some of the trends coming out of the industry—mostly models that resemble the iTunes or the surge in the movie industry of DVDs loaded with special features. Publishers such as HarperCollins and Penguin are revamping their backlist titles with features like web links and imbedded video and audio, hoping to target consumers who already own print titles and lure them to add a digital edition to get the enhanced features. 

A spokesperson for Random House of Canada says the company has “observed parallels between e-book and music downloading habits,” and thinks that in the same way music lovers purchase entire album collections when they discover a favorite new artist, e-books will encourage users to nab an author’s entire works with a single click. 

Another industry insider predicts that once e-books hit their zenith we’ll see an entirely new trend: She envisions some consumers purchasing what she calls “disposable reading”—titles you might buy at the airport before boarding a long flight—in digital format, and serious works—titles you might want to reread some day or pass along to your kids—in print editions. “In some respects, the book will go back to being an objet,” she hypothesizes, “[a] beautiful, expensive edition that people want to pay for [and keep], almost the way [books were treated] in the 16th and 17th centuries.” 

Which, in the end, leaves us right back where we started. 

Source: Quill & Quire (article not available online)

Image by timonoko, licensed under Creative Commons.

What happens when a prolific writer visits the former home of an American literary legend? Does she feel a connection, or find inspiration, or see a writerly ghost?

In Anne Trubek’s case, none of the above. In the new issue of The American Prospect, Trubek, an English professor at Oberlin College, describes her visit to a dilapidated house in Cleveland where Langston Hughes once lived (for a whopping two years). A community development corporation recently bought the foreclosed house for $100, with the intention of fixing it up, having it designated a historic landmark, and, hopefully, selling it to somebody who would open it as a Langston Hughes museum.

Sounds nice, right? Such a museum would, potentially, “honor a writer, preserve the cultural legacy of the neighborhood, and bring in tourist dollars,” Trubek writes. “But investing in writers’ former homes is not a development tactic with a great track record. There are about 55 writers’ houses open to the public in America. Most are owned by civic organizations, and many lose money.” They tend to become very expensive to maintain, as “their curators continually have to perform the same tasks all homeowners of aging houses do,” Trubek writes. “These houses only grow older and, thus, more costly.” Furthermore, she explains, many of these museums struggle to attract visitors.

The neighborhoods that surround these house museums, including the former Hughes home [in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood], provide a snapshot of American demographic trends. Not surprisingly, many of our revered dead writers lived in the areas of the country that drew immigrants to agricultural and then industrial jobs—areas that have been hit hard by economic changes. New York City would seem to be the ground zero for literary tourism, but the only writer’s house museum in the five boroughs is the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, in the Bronx, which is currently closed for renovations. Until a new wave of famous, city-dwelling authors die, writers’ house museums will continue to be clustered east of the Mississippi. At least we can all look forward to one day taking the Dave Eggers home museum tour in San Francisco.

Source: The American Prospect (excerpt only available online)

Image by szlea, licensed under Creative Commons.

The birdfeeder industrial complex is raking in cash, inviting controversy, and may be changing the genetic structure of bird populations. Writing for The Smart Set, Jesse Smith pecks at the multi-billion-dollar bird-feeding industry and finds rampant consumerism, scientific data fights, and a hobby that is altering the course of life itself. According to research cited by Smith, the predominance of bird feeders in England has shifted migratory patterns for some Central European blackcaps, causing some of the birds to stay in England for the winter and others to venture on to Spain. The different groups are already showing genetic adaptations suited to the two different climates, and could lead the birds to split into two separate species.

Source: The Smart Set 

Image by Scorpion0422, licensed under Creative Commons.

The chaos and destruction caused by Haiti’s earthquake are difficult for anyone to articulate, especially for a teenager. Global Voices points to two teenage bloggers who have provided eloquent first-person views of the earthquake and the emotional and physical devastation that it has caused. Before the disaster, a 16-year-old calling herself Krizkadiak wrote about singing and dancing alone on a Friday night. Afterwards, she wrote this:

I saw my school fall in front of me. 
I saw people running covered in dust, hearing that their houses fell… sometimes with people in them. 
I saw a refugee camp, as they are on tv… people praying, people alive but not really… 
I saw a baby half dead, covered in bandaids… 
I saw a friend at the cemetery burying his little cousin. 
I saw the oldest and prettiest houses of jacmel reduced to nothing. 
I saw pickup truck filled with corpses… 
I saw my teacher walking to the cemetery behind the car where his wife’s dead body was… 
I saw kids from my school, people i KNOW, at the refugee camp… 
And lots of stuff… i hear about dead people every second, tsunami alerts when i know i leave at the beach, stupid people trynna take profit, no gas, no water no food. 
But what I didn't see though… Is the haitian police and the Mayor. shame. 

Source: Global Voices 

Photo by the UN Photo/Marco Dormino, licensed under Creative Commons.