Calling all word nerds! If you’ve never checked out Wordnik, then you’re in for a real treat. The start-up website aims to be an all-in-one dictionary resource, outfitting each word with a roundup of definitions from different online sources, related Flickr photos, recent Twitter tweets using the word, usage stats, etymologies, comments, pronunciations, and more. Plus, you can also create a profile to tag and save favorite words, put them into lists, and record your own pronunciations.

In the fall issue of Venus Zine, Jane Solomon profiles Heather Rivers, who is a computational lexicographer for Wordnik. Solomon shares this charming tidbit about the office culture:

“Because the Wordnikers started out by working remotely, they’ve grown accustomed to communicating over IM—even when they’re all together in their now-shared office space. People outside the team have found this modus operandi ‘possibly the saddest thing ever,’ especially when someone unleashes a lexicographical knee-slapper that causes everyone to erupt in laughter and then return diligently to work, all without eye contact.”

Source: Venus Zine

Image by j / f / photos, licensed under Creative Commons.

When playing with Legos, it’s important to keep the “four-er flat hinge-y bits” separate from the “clippy bits.” Every Lego enthusiast, or family of Lego enthusiasts, seems to develop their own language to tell a “T-shaped joiney thing” apart from a “car mirror piece.” Writing for The Morning News, Giles Turnbull conducted a highly scientific survey of two American children and two British kids about what they call the different Lego pieces. That way, if someone asks for a “golden snapper” readers will know they really need a “flat clippy piece.”

Source: The Morning News 

Image by  Woodley Wonderworks , licensed under  Creative Commons .

William Patrick Tandy, editor of the zine Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore, recounts a recent night he lay awake in bed listening to the all-too-familiar sound of gunshots ringing out in his neighborhood. A frequent reader of the police blotter, Tandy notes that single gunshots are relatively common and go unreported, but on this particular night, he ruminates on an even more unsettling experience:

“I counted 10 shots that night before drifting off to sleep, none of which were accounted for in the following week’s blotter—not for 9:53 or four or any other time. Nor were the splotches of crimson that staggered up the sidewalk from the adjacent alley the next morning, steadily eroding in size before vanishing entirely a few doors down, like the ruins of some long-forgotten culture…”

Source: Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! (article not available online)

On Thursday, excited children in classrooms around the world came together to read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, hoping to set a new world record for the largest simultaneous reading experience. The kids were participating in this year’s Read for the Record event, which set the record in 2008 when 700,000 children teamed up to read the classic Don Freeman book Corduroy (the final count for this year isn't in yet).

The folks at Chronicle Books (who know a thing or two about children’s lit) joined the fun by visiting Bay Area elementary schools, where they read from oversized versions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and took in some of that youthful enthusiasm for reading. Here’s an adorable video from their visit to San Francisco’s Bret Harte Elementary School:   

Source: Chronicle Books blog

You know that funny little red thing on the top of a rooster’s head? It’s called a cockscomb, and as Francine Segan recounts for Gastronomica, it’s very tasty:

What are these morsels that look like the fingers of a doll-sized woolen globe? . . . We take a taste. The spikes are slightly gelatinous, with hints of delicate frog-leg flavor. “Delicious” is the consensus.

Segan stumbles upon this rare ingredient on a trip to the Piedmont region of northern Italy, where cockscomb is a vital ingredient in a stew known as la finanziera, a 200-year-old dish that also utilizes a rooster’s wattles and testicles (among many other ingredients). The cockscomb seems to be the star of the show, though, which makes sense given the amount of work that goes into its preparation:

Cleaning the cockscombs, which have a thick outer skin loaded with feathers, is a labor-intensive task. The feathers are plucked, and any tiny strays are burned off with a flame. The cockscombs are then washed, blanched, and soaked in lemon juice to loosen the tough skin. The entire staff, even the busboys, gathers around the kitchen table every Wednesday to peel off this outer layer. “You have to handle the crests gently, like a beautiful woman, so as not to ruin the pretty tips,” Chef Beppe laughs.

The article isn't available online, but if you're up for a cockscomb adventure, track down the Summer 2009 issue of Gastronomica—Segan includes two recipes (including one for la finanziera) at the end of the piece.

Source: Gastronomica 

Image by Tennessee Wanderer, licensed under Creative Commons.

Move over Sesame Street. Clever skits that target older generations (remember Sesame Street’s Bruce Springsteen parody, “Born to Add”?) have been replaced by the hyper pre-teen SpongeBob SquarePants.

Though it's hard for many adults to feel comfortable with such tinsel flashing before our youngsters’ eyes, James Parker, writing for the very mature Atlantic magazine, embraces that change. Parker offers up a philosophical view of SpongeBob, dissecting the “postmodern place” that is Bikini Bottom (SpongeBob’s home), and explaining why kids love—and should love—the golden sponge:

As a cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants absorbed the advances made by John Kricfalusi’s The Ren and Stimpy Show—the mood swings, the fugue-like interludes, the surreal plasticity of the characters—but without the earlier show’s edge of psychic antagonism […] But where Ren and Stimpy seemed bent on freaking out the more fragile (or stoned) sectors of its audience, the SquarePants writers are interested in stories, even in lessons. Again and again, a kind of innocence triumphs—over fear, over snobbery, and over skepticism.

If your eyes hurt at sight of SpongeBob’s manic grin, try reading this story and consider Parker’s plea: “Embrace him, drained adult. Where you see his little yellow flag, salute it; it’s a sign of life.”

For more, watch Parker analyze a few scenes from the show in the video below:

Source: The Atlantic

Image by  Stéfan , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Writing is hard. That’s what singer/songwriter Gillian Welch and writer Lydia Peelle are talking about in this excerpt from a conversation between the two printed in BOMB. Peelle’s latest book is a collection of short stories called Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.  Welch’s last record was Soul Journey, released way back in 2003. Here’s what the pair had to say to each other about writing:

Lydia Peelle: Sometimes it’s like I’m watching myself sitting there at the desk, and saying, Wait a minute. Stop right there. I know what you’re about to do, and it won’t work, so don’t even try it. What I learned is that I am an extremely inefficient writer.

Gillian Welch: It sounds like we have a similar process.

LP: Just reams of wasted paper. I feel like I have to know the whole story, as if someone has told it to me, before I actually write it … For a while I couldn’t write a story unless I knew whether or not each person in the story believed in God. Then there’s, of course, rewriting the same paragraph over and over, because I’m afraid to go on, or I don’t know where to go next … Someone told me recently that you shouldn’t sit down to write without knowing what you’re going to write about. I thought, Hang on, that’s like three-fourths of my process right there, sitting there staring at the desk!

GW: Me too, and then I don’t start writing until I’m totally miserable.

LP: Writing is so painful. There are so many things I’d rather do than write. I think I’d rather do anything than write.

GW: Jerry Garcia said, “I’d rather pitch cards into a hat all day than write a song.”

LP: Flannery O’Connor said it was like trying to eat a horse blanket. The thing is—you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to just get something down. If I’ve done that, then I know I can go on with the rest of my day and do all the other things I do. Writing that one page—or even that one paragraph or sentence—is the one sacred part of the day.

Source: BOMB 

Mark Twain wasn’t just a riverboat pilot, a raconteur, a mustache pioneer, and one of the great early American celebrity-authors: He was also an animal rights activist. The new Twain compilation Mark Twain’s Book of Animals (University of California Press) explores Twain’s treatment of animals —in literature and in life—throughout his career and arrives at an inescapable conclusion: He was a softie when it came to the beasts. Twain may have come to largely despise what he famously called “the damned human race,” yet he turned into a puddle of mush at the sight of a kitten.

In her introduction, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin traces Twain’s sympathy for animals to his youth and especially to his mother, who kept a house full of cats with names like Blatherskite and Belchazar and once soundly berated a man in the street for beating his horse. Fisher Fishkin also digs up evidence that a formative experience for Twain was his shooting of a bird as a child, an act he deeply regretted. In the previously unpublished “Family Sketch,” he writes:

. . . I shot a bird that sat in a high tree, with its head tilted back, and pouring out a grateful song from an innocent heart. It toppled from its perch and came floating down limp and forlorn and fell at my feet, its song quenched and its unoffending life extinguished. I had not needed that harmless creature, I had destroyed it wantonly, and I felt all that an assassin feels, of grief and remorse when his deed comes home to him and he wishes he could undo it and have his hands and his soul clean again from accusing blood.

Fisher Fishkin goes on to follow the threads of Twain’s animal fascinations and sympathies in his writings, from his early celebrated story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” to his “Letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society,” which is perhaps the best known expression of his views on animal cruelty. “From 1899 until his death in 1910,” writes Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain lent his pen to reform efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and became the best-known American author—and, indeed, the most famous American celebrity in any field—to give outspoken, public support to agitation for animal welfare.”

Editors have a hard time resigning themselves to the creeping destruction of the English language. A few have decided to fight back against the hackneyed popular fiction and nearly incomprehensible public speaking that infects common discourse. Though some 80 million copies of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code have been sold, Brian Joseph Davis of The Globe and Mail writes that the author’s writing style “is so toxically inept that Vladimir Putin could use it to poison dissidents.”

Rather than simply criticizing idly, Davis took a crack at editing the first two chapters of Brown’s novel. He released PDFs of his efforts, complete with deletions, additions, and comments in the text. Davis tried desperately to excise a few uses of the word “slowly,” which appears 7 times in the first 10 pages.

A similar effort was undertaken by the editors at Vanity Fair, after Sarah Palin made a mockery of her native language during her resignation speech. The literary editor, copy editor, and research editor took their pens to a transcript of the speech in a valiant effort to make the semi-coherent speech comprehensible. The result is cluttered with ink, but a vast improvement over the original.

Both efforts came too late to salvage the original source material. Perhaps next time, Brown will think twice before using the word “slowly,” and Palin will try and check her facts. (Not likely, though.)

Sources: The Globe and Mail, Vanity Fair 

Image by  AlaskaTeacher,  licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Intrigue! Obsession! Money! Obsession! It’s all here, in a very entertaining Village Voice peek inside the impassioned world of sneaker connoisseurs. The colorful piece, written by Elizabeth Dwoskin, profiles a bigwig among sneakerheads, Mark Farese (a.k.a. “The Mayor”)—he is the proud owner of 1,400 pairs of sneakers, most of them Air Force 1s:

Farese pulls out some of his most treasured possessions. There are the two white pairs on which Chinese characters are stitched in red thread that were manufactured for athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics but never sold commercially. (He won't say how he obtained them.) There are handmade pairs covered in real crocodile and anaconda skin and dyed in rich shades of red, orange, and black, that include lace tags with gold trim (Nike's price: $2,000). . . . Some are made of suede or fake fur; others glow in the dark. He had one pair encrusted with real diamonds. Others have his name engraved in gold. Some have an image of his face that he commissioned an artist to design.

Farese, unlike many other sneakerheads, does actually walk a mile in his shoes. “People call me a collector,” he tells Dwoskin, “but I’m a sneaker wearer. I wear my sneakers. It takes me a long time, 'cause I have an abundance, but I wear them.”

It’s a fascinating portrait of the sneakerhead subculture, in which Farese is a veritable celebrity. There’s a brilliant moment in the story where a 14-year-old fan meets Farese for the first time. “He’s, like, the king of all sneakerheads,” the boy tells the Voice. “I expected him to be a little cocky, but he blew me away ‘cause of how respectful he was of everyone else’s shoes. And he told me not to just focus on sneakers, but to focus on, like, college and stuff, too.”

Source: Village Voice   

Image by sling@flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

Canned food is one of the more underappreciated staples of the human diet. According to James Parker, writing for the Boston Globe ideas section, the humble canned food—invented by a Frenchman and industrialized by the British—is “an instrument of culture,” diffusing knowledge across borders, “agent of dietary democracy” understated in its transnational diplomacy. It’s also a symbol of rich philosophy, standing for “asceticism, separateness, lack of nurture, the dignity of the mental life.” Let the snobs scoff at the understated value of the canned food. Parker writes:

Let’s face it, we can’t all be cooks. And for those of us unattached to the soil, amicably divorced from Nature, to whom the seasonal tang and the fibrous crunch of freshness are matters of indifference, civilization has made a single marvelous provision: canned food.

Source: Boston Globe 

Image by  timsamoff , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

In case you missed them the first time around...here are the ten most popular reads at Utne.com this week. Enjoy!

Eating Meat for the Environment

Liberals Aren't Un-American. Conservatives Aren't Ignorant

Love Is Creative, Sex Is Analytical 

The Environmental Cost of a Free Canvas Bag 

Behind the Scenes at Bitch Magazine 

How 9/11 Should Be Remembered 

Pretty Lights Save 100,000 Birds 

When Was the Last Time You Paid for Short Stories? 

Finding Happiness 

Minsk's Underground University 

Peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiched between two pieces of white bread, known as the fluffernutter, may be one of the most cherished foods in New England. And when Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios tried to restrict Marshmallow Fluff intake among school children—limiting public schools to just one serving per week—Barrio’s constituents rebelled. As Katie Liesener eruditely reports for Gastronomica, “fluff runs deep in this country.” 

In response to Barrio’s regulation attempt, residents organized a movement to declare the fluffernutter the official Massachusetts state sandwich. Barrio eventually withdrew his anti-fluff legislation, and a loyal aide assured the Associated Press that “He loves Fluff as much as the next legislator.” Liesener provides an engaging and wonderfully crafted profile of the controversy, dubbed a “kerfuffle,” and the enigmatic company behind the iconic Marshmallow Fluff. “Outsiders may know New England for its baked beans and chowder,” Liesener writes, but deep in the hearts and pantries of New England homes lies a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

Source: Gastronomica

Image by jessamyn, licensed under Creative Commons.

“More crappy news for short story writers,” is how The Rumpus interpreted a literary agent’s polite rejection note to short story writer writer Mark Tainer:

... I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don't like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can't in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it...

This triggered Rumpus blogger Seth Fischer. “The form of the short story collection is so uniquely well-suited to the Internet age,” writes Fischer. “A good short story should grab you by the junk and make you yelp in that first line. So should good web copy. A good short story should be no longer than it need be. So should good web copy. There are many very important differences between the two types of writing, but the publishing houses could be taking advantage of the similarities to develop a model that could turn a profit.”

Is the publishing industry’s lethargy towards short story collections really news? A commenter at Tainer’s blog points to a newspaper column by short story writer Dennis Loy Johnson, who took up the issue way back in 2001:

The problem, it is often said, is that story collections have never sold much, although I'd point out that they've never been promoted much, either. Hype them as heavily as some novels get hyped — Raymond Carver, Melissa Bank — and they sell just fine, thank you. I mean, no American should ever forget that we live in a country where someone not that long ago made a fortune selling pet rocks at Christmastime.

“It seems to me that all it would take is a tiny bit of ingenuity to make money off the right short story collection,” writes Fischer. “Why aren’t the publishing houses trying it?”

Are you supporting the lowly short story writer? When was the last time you paid for short stories?

Source: The Rumpus 

Image by ginnerobot, licensed under Creative Commons.

Get out your awesome-nerdy-tech hat and strap it on securely: Robin Sloan, a San Francisco-based writer (and web worker), is using Google ads to select a name for the lead character in his forthcoming detective novel—a cool and fitting experiment for a book funded through Kickstarter.

“I’m trying to craft a central character with some of that same iconic strangeness that makes Sherlock Holmes so appealing,” Sloan writes on RobinSloan.com. “There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sherlock Holmes. It leaves an indelible mark on the brain.”

Sloan spent $40 to take out a series of Google AdWords spots—those little ads that pop up next to any search based on keywords. Each ad included a different potential name and the same blurb, like this: Julie Hanus. She’s the Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. robinsloan.com.

A ranking emerged based on the number of clicks each ad received out of the number of pages it appeared upon. His original idea came in at a .21 percent click-through rate, Sloan writes, while a name he’d been most fond of netted a paltry .07 percent.

Sloan admits the exercise was “mostly an excuse to try a new tool,” but he’s also got his eye on the possibilities. “I mean, imagine—this is the sci-fi extrapolation—imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it,” he writes.

“Five minutes later, ding—the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: ‘I stumbled here,’ ‘this variation works better,’ ‘this line rings false.’ ”

Bonus item: Check out my write up of Kerry Skemp’s You’re Talking a Lot but You’re Not Saying Anything for more intriguing thoughts on the future of online feedback-and-commenting.

(Thanks, Booklorn.)

Source: RobinSloan.com

Literary critics have long argued that novels are inherently anti-religious. They believe that novels, with their many voices and styles, necessarily challenge the certainty of a worldview with a divinely authored text at its core. In the book The Broken Estate James Wood said, “it was not just science but perhaps the novel itself which helped to kill Jesus’ divinity, when it gave us a new sense of the real.”

This view is overly simplistic (pdf), Justin Neuman writes for Culture magazine. According to Neuman, too many people assume a sharp divide with religion on one side and debate, questioning, and literary freedom on the other. This marginalizes many aspects of religion that encourage the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. It also misses the potential that both novels and religion have to change people’s worldviews for the better.

Source: Culture

Image by (michelle), licensed under Creative Commons.

The next person to press their forehead to my shoulder and weep over the fate of the printed word will be fined (standard practice) and then made to sit in a comfortable chair with a copy of the emerging writers issue of Urbanite. In it, there is a down right inspiring interview with the husband and wife team (writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr) who run a tiny press called Idiots’ Books. They are purveyors of “odd, commercially non-viable illustrated books” distributed through a subscription service. As long as there are relentlessly innovative storytellers like these two around, words will find their way to the page and the page will find its way to a reader (who will pay for it, I assure you).

Lately, Swanson and Behr have been creating short stories they call One-Page Wonders, which Urbanite describes as “circular confections of words and images whose elements can be cut, folded, and manipulated by enterprising readers.” One of these delightful creations is included in the magazine, and you can watch how it works in the video at the bottom of this post.

Swanson and Behr are also teachers, and Urbanite  asked them about the advice they give to aspiring writers:

Urbanite:  When you’re teaching student writers, do you give them the brutal truth about their dim prospects for actually making a living with this skill? How do you prepare young people for a career in 
this business?

Matthew: Our bottom line is to try to teach them to be thinking people. Even though we are helping them with their craft, we care far more about the evolution of thought and the development of concept and the ability to draft an idea and articulate it. That is paramount to us.

Robbi: For the writing to work, it’s not just about spinning an interesting narrative; it’s about getting an idea across in a thoughtful way. In terms of preparing them to be writers, mostly we just tell them it’s work. No matter what you do, if you’re going to be successful at it, you have to work. If you’re not willing to just do the hard work, it’s not going to happen.

Matthew: We also tell them that both of us had to spend a decade mucking through the professional world while developing other skills and creating salaries for ourselves so that we could go off the grid. This myth of just sitting in your apartment and creating art and having it become your career might work for a few really lucky people, but in general making art is kind of a deliberate byproduct of a life plan that includes some other things that you have to do along the way. Hopefully, they are things that you enjoy and have relevance.

 Here's the (very charming) video demonstration of a One-Page Wonder:

And hey! Visit our new homepage for great writing, curated by Utne Reader editors and always changing.

Source: Urbanite

Image courtesy of Robbi Behr.

We struggle with how to write about poetry at Utne Reader, and it’s not because we don’t read it and love it. The closest we’ve come lately in our pages is an interview with undertaker and writer Thomas Lynch: “The reason poets aren’t read,” he said, “is that we don’t hang any of them anymore”:

We don’t take them seriously; we don’t think that poetry can move people to do passionate things. But poets did. Poets could change cultures. Before there was so much contest for people’s attention, poets were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered, because the tradition was oral before it was literary.

That was the last best thing I had read about poetry—until I stumbled upon an essay by Karin de Weille in the Writer’s Chronicle. Lynch’s spiel was profound, but it was almost like he was eulogizing poetry. Not so in de Weille’s piece, How We Are Changed by the Rhythms of Poetry. “A poem designed to evoke anger,” she writes, “does much more than give us information about the triggering event; it shapes our energy into the very rhythms of anger. A series of words is chosen because it literally causes us to sputter and spit, stirring up memories and experiences from our personal past, reviving the emotion itself.”

Poetry, de Weille adds, “asks us to pump this life into our throats and out through our mouths. Then it can circulate among us, with total disregard for the distinctions that otherwise rule our lives.”

Visit our new homepage for great writing, curated by Utne Reader editors and always changing.

Source: Writer’s Chronicle (Article not yet available online)

In the category of brilliant ideas: If you make less than $25,000/year, you can request a free galley copy of Stephen Elliott’s true-crime memoir The Adderall Diaries, released today from Graywolf Press. (Galleys are those advance reader copies, soft-cover editions that sometimes find homes in reading programs and the like, but too often end up in recycling bins.)

Read about the free book offer at The Rumpus, which Elliott edits, plus details of his book tour.

Source: Graywolf Press, The Rumpus

In case you missed them the first time around...here are the ten most popular reads at Utne.com this week. Enjoy!

Obscene Astronomy and Street-Smart Stargazing 

Find the Hate Groups in Your State 

The Raw and the Cooked: Sushi with a Conscience 

Are You Happy Now? How to Cultivate Positive Emotions 

Liberals Aren't Un-American. Conservatives Aren't Ignorant. 

Who the Internet Thinks You Are 

The Lying Brains of Lying Liars 

Camping for Their Lives 

Idle chicken scratches left on scratch paper can have profound meaning. The doodle, Matthew Battles writes for Hilobrow, “is at once the most common and the most ignored art form.” People have been doodling for millennia, scrawling stick figures into the walls of caves and onto pieces of pottery. In post-Fruedian interpretation, these doodles can be windows into people’s unconscious minds. Though the action is sometimes conflated with “scribbling,” Battles writes: 

Scribbling is not doodling, because scribbles are marks made in haste or by an uncertain hand. Doodling, by contrast, is beyond craft and criticism; it belongs to us all; it’s impossible to do it badly—or well. It springs from that flourishing thicket, common to everyone, where mind shoots forth its florid branches from the rootstock of the animal brain. Its intent, if it has one, differs from the preliminary brainstorming of sketching and the territorial mark-making of graffiti: it is the graphic expression of ennui, an existential criticism of the world-as-such.

Source: Hilobrow 

Allow me this personal aside: I blame featherproof books. Until today, I was impervious to iPhone envy. No more.

This September, featherproof is releasing its first iPhone app: TripleQuick fiction. Almost too cute/cool to bear, TripleQuick will allow users to download super-short stories (exactly 333 words, or three iPhone screens) to their mobiles. The Chicago-based publisher, which already offers free, downloadable mini-books from an impressive array of hip writers, reports that it has a bunch of fun writers lined up for the launch.

Here’s the most forward-thinking part: TripleQuick is a two-way street. “Those with the writerly inclination can just type in three screens of their best work, type in a bio, even take an author photo using the iPhone’s camera, and submit the story to the featherproof editors,” copublisher Zach Dodson writes.

“So, what more could you want? Oh yeah, an iPhone. Well now you have the best excuse yet: great literature compressed for the digital age.”

Yeah, I’d tend to agree.

Source: featherproof books

Image courtesy of featherproof books, featuring Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes.

In 1654, people weren’t smoking tobacco. They were “drinking” smoke from pipes. And in the early nineteenth century, English speakers referred to a set of false teeth as a “ratelier,” derived from the French word for “rack.” These insights come from the food magazine Gastronomica, where Mark Morton has compiled a linguistic history of chewing tobacco, false teeth, and other non-food items that people stick in their mouths.

In the article, Morton revives the word “gamahuche,” an awkward and little-known euphemism for oral sex. He also sheds some light on the history of “toothpaste,” a word which appeared in English long after the Romans were using human urine to whiten their teeth. An advertisement in The American Railroad Journal used the term “toothpaste” in 1832, just 13 years after the Family Receipt Book suggested the use of gunpowder as a tooth whitener.

Source: Gastronomica 

Curing your own meat is easy—and there are many artful ways to display your hunk-of-meat work in progress, as Yolanda de Montijo explains in the new issue of Meatpaper (article not available online). Once you’ve begun your quest to cure your own salami, prosciutto, or pancetta, she writes, “you are faced with a challenge that many an artisan curer has pondered: Where to hang?”

De Montijo offers a number of fun (and functional) suggestions, including the “kitchen hang”— which “gives your kitchen an immediate pastoral or country look, as though you could just as well be churning butter or turning out garlic braids. Be sure to hang it away from direct sunlight”—and the “full frontal hang,” wherein “you simply pick any workable place in your living space without regard for aesthetics or the squeamishiness of houseguests. Corners work well—especially those near the front or back door.”

For her inaugural home-cured pancetta project, De Montijo chooses the closet in her guest bedroom, which houses her slab o’ salted pig flesh for a couple of weeks. It seems like a good option for the urban curer: “It’s likely to maintain a consistent temperature, and in hot weather you can leave the door ajar, or set a fan nearby for air circulation.” But, she warns, “check regularly to see that your clothes or other items don’t embrace the smell of the meat. More than you want them to, anyway.”

Source: Meatpaper

Image by marcelo träsel, licensed under Creative Commons.

The title character of Junot Diaz’s excellent, Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a pudgy, awkward kid from the Dominican Republic. In an interview with Guernica, Diaz tells how he got the inspiration for the book’s title:

That night we were just all hanging out and it was a bunch of Mexican bohemians and me and my Guatemalan buddy. And one of these Mexican cats just pulled a book off a shelf and just cornered me and was like, “My favorite writer in the world.” He was telling me, “My favorite writer in the world is Oscar Wao, I love Oscar Wao, Oscar Wao is brilliant.” And I was dying because I knew he meant Oscar Wilde. That’s where the book began. After that party I went home and I laid in bed, and I suddenly had this idea of this fore-cursed family. This idea of this awkward fat boy and this idea that this family would be cursed in love, that they would have great trouble finding love. You know it just felt like a real good kind of novella, telenovela type plot. I just thought, “Hey, I can work with this, you know, I can really change this into something else.”

Source: Guernica 

I'm a faithful reader of Matt Novak's Paleo-Future blog. His "look into the future that never was" never disappoints, especially if you like laughing at foolish futurists (because you never lulled yourself into a prepubescent sleep with images of jet packs and flying cars, right?). I'm most fond of Novak's posts about children imagining the future. There's the 14-year-old from Milwaukee in 1901 who imagines a advertisement on the 199th floor of a 120-floor skyscraper in the year 2001 that reads: "Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait." And there's another 14-year-old from Milwaukee, also imagining 2001, who predicted that "The people of the Earth will be in close communication with Mars by being shot off in great cannons. The cannon ball will be hollow to contain food and drink."

My favorite might be Letters by 4th Graders to the Year 2000. "These kids really hit all the major futurism topics of the 20th century," Novak says in his setup, "robot maids, moving sidewalks, flying cars, meal pills, push button everything, education through television, socialism, and candy. Lots of candy." Here's the future these kids imagined:

In the year 2000 I think that cars can fly in the air as fast as they want to without using gas. You can get whatever you want, including candy. Houses will be way up in the sky. You can have robots to do the housework for the mothers. Instead of walking, the the sidewalks will move for you. Your friend, Laurie Smith

In the year 2000 I think thay kids will be taught at home on their TV. The army will be using lazor guns. Cars will be like spaceships and the strreetlights will be on long tall poles. Another means of transportation will be push buttons. Select where you want to go, push a button, step through a door, and you'll be where you wanted to be. Food will be in tablet form, put on water on the tablet and your food will be on your plate. Sincerely yours, R.C. Brown

I think in the year 2000 the earth will be much more polluted than it is. I also think that we will have no more school, and cars can go as fast as they want without getting a ticket. Sincerely, Yolanda Tejeda

Want more? We asked Novak all about Paleo-Future for the Utne Reader podcast.

Source: Paleo-Future 

Image by Bruce Mcall.

What’s the future of fiction? The stalwart American Book Review has the answer. Well, answers: The publication collected opinions from over 60 people (largely scholars, writers, and literary critics), and printed the delightful/depressing offerings in its July-August 2009 issue.

From mini-dissertations to one-liners, from quoted lyrics to URLs, the collected thoughts aren’t merely prophecy; they’re also a sounding board for the mood of the literary community at this moment when print is largely considered to be in peril. Here are some standouts:

Jim Ruland: Fiction is alive and well; it’s the machines through which these inventions are expressed (i.e., books) that are going the way of the dodo. If this process comes to be known as the de-commodification of fiction, then the next few decades will be extraordinary.

Michael Bérubé: I’m inclined to reply with a URL:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/novelists_strike_fails_to_affect.

Kelly Cherry: The future of fiction may lie in some combination of hypertextuality, intertextuality, and video, but if so, it will have to do without me. Of course, it will ultimately have to do without me no matter what direction it goes in, so at this point I’m not very invested in the question. But I believe that no matter what fiction will continue to be interested in character and language. How otherwise?

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: I see fiction’s future as strong in the coming years: in tough times, people turn more than ever to stories, which tell the truth aslant and cleanse us through catharsis, and novels are still the least expensive and most meaningful way to travel the world.

Marjorie Perloff: I predict future fiction will be much more transnational than it was in the 60s–70s. Witness the attention Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, W. G. Sebald, and others are receiving.

Larry Fondation: The future of fiction rests with its ability to regain its public function—as a principal way we relate narrative, as an indispensable means of telling our story and that of our era.

Stephen Graham Jones: Fiction’s future: it’s all made up.

Source: American Book Review

Image by helgasms!, licensed under Creative Commons.

By now you’ve heard of the staycation, touted as the recession-friendly cousin of the vacation. But, as political comic Will Durst writes in Funny Times, “The problem with most folks planning a staycation is they focus on the high points of local landmarks but forget to include all the little moments that truly distinguish memorable holiday excursions.” He then offers up his own list of tips for having an authentic vacation experience at home, adding all the waiting and frustration that happens in reality. You can find all of Durst’s suggestions for “Staycation Fun” in his column archives, but here are a few favorites:

Pack luggage like you’re really headed on a trip, then pick a piece to misplace for the duration.

Duplicate inevitable airport delay by wasting four hours at a 7/11.

Sit on curb outside your house for 90 minutes because your room isn’t ready yet.

Every two hours, burn 60 dollars.

Set alarm for 6 a.m. to receive wake-up call for room next to yours. Knock on door at half-hour intervals with a cry of: “Housekeeping!”  

Eat at a strange restaurant and grunt and point at the menu, unable to speak the native language, even if it’s only Floridian.

For full tropical experience, dump sand in your bed.

Source: Funny Times

Image by masochismtango, licensed under Creative Commons.

A little more affection for airplanes could fight the fear of flying, Javier Marías writes for Granta. He would feel a lot more at ease if pilots would show the respect for their planes that ship captains once displayed for their vessels. Marías tends to anthropomorphize the planes he rides on, thinking of them as a living entity, capable of its own personality. He writes:

Given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them—those complex machines endowed with movement to which we surrender ourselves and that transport us through the air—is that it isn’t more ‘personal’, or more ‘animal’, or more ‘sailor-like’, if you prefer.... That’s what I would like to see, less cool efficiency and more affection.

Source: Granta

It's a bold move for Hollywood to resurrect GI Joe in a time of war—not that the archetypal warrior figure ever really disappeared from the national psyche. Many of our warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan are men. Those men were once boys and those boys, no doubt, spent hours belly down on the floor pitting one tiny GI Joe action figure against another.

When writer Leah Larson's brother came home from nine months in Iraq she wrote about the "unspeakable damage" to her brother and their relationship. And she wrote about GI Joe. We printed her piece two years ago and offer up this excerpt as a sort of footnote to Hollywood's fantastical treatment of the famous toy warrior:

Two days after he came home from a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, my older brother showed me some pictures. 'I just bombed that building,' he said. In the photo, children in Fallujah are clustered beside their broken school.

During his first two weeks back, my brother, the demolitions expert, plied me with photos of the carnage and mayhem wreaked by his platoon. Fifteen memory cards worth of bizarre and disturbing photos—half-naked soldiers dancing in the desert, a severed goat's head in a noose, Marines dressed in traditional women's clothing found following a house raid.

I wanted to hit him, banish him, to create a giant dent in his soul. But he wouldn't care, wouldn't budge. This is what the Marines have trained him to do—warp, destroy, and believe it is for good.

When recruiters came to take him, I howled, groped, twisted, and shivered at the horrible separation from him. At a young age, long before I recognized politics, my spirit understood many things. I knew that if he joined the military, our kinship would be severed, and it has been. It saddens me when I am unable to hug him because he cannot tolerate affection. Our mother recalls that my brother could only be comforted by his GI Joe toys. Lying in the top bunk, while I slept on the bottom, he would watch a sky of little green men dangle from the ropes he tied to the ceiling.

Now, instead of green men, my brother keeps metal, wood, and crystal beaded crosses in his room. Some hang over pictures of friends killed in the war. 

It’s a cliché to call any place, “a city of contradictions.” After living in Japan for almost a decade, Pico Iyer realized, “contradiction is in many ways in the eye of the beholder.” He writes for WorldHum that foreigners often interpret contradictions in their superficial readings of situations. For example, Japanese people may be quite comfortable mixing traditional and modern cultures, while Americans think it’s strange to see a Buddhist priest popping a beer and watching television.

“The biggest challenge today is how to make our peace with alienness,” Iyre wrote for Utne Reader back in 2000. It’s helpful for foreigners abroad to remember how strange they must seem to other people. Recognizing the mutual strangeness, and finding comfort in the contradictions, teaches people as much about themselves as it illuminates other cultures. Iyer writes, “The global village has given us the chance to move among the foreign, and so to simplify and clarify ourselves.”

Source:  WorldHum  

Image by  Stefan , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Book nerds and children’s literature nostalgics alike were treated today when Twitter exploded with the trending topic #failedchildrensbooktitles. Plenty of “failed titles” took the raunchy road—can it ever be helped on the internet?—while others proved good old fashioned humor still has a place online. Some of my non-offensive favorites (with their twittering creators in parenthesis):

Ramona Quimby, age 38 (@ the_games_afoot)

Furious George (@ swagner1031)

Little House on Stolen Land (@ kitchenartist)

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Mercury Poisoning (@ Fletcherism73)

Horton Hears The Who (@ NilsAParker)

The Bailout Tree (@ markolivas)

Punch the Bunny (@ manningtheship)

Nobody Else Poops (@ diablocody)

Where the Wild Things Eat You (@ bmerritt)

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Bertrand Russell  (@joshuacmurphy)

And on that note, if you haven’t yet watched this clip of Will Arnett reading from Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, you’re in for another children’s classics take-two treat.

Source: Twitter

So you’re stuck in the hospital, preparing for or recovering from this or that procedure—what books do you bring along to keep yourself busy? Canadian author Alberto Manguel tackles the question in the new issue of Geist, describing his careful process for selecting hospital reading during a couple of recent stays.

During his first trip to the hospital, Manguel decides against a number of genres, including recent fiction ("too risky because unproven") and biographies ("too crowded: hooked to a tangle of drips, I found other people's presence annoying"). Ultimately, he opts for “the equivalent of comfort food, something I’d once enjoyed and could endlessly and effortlessly revisit,” he writes. “I asked my friend to bring me my two volumes of Don Quixote.”

Because I’ve kept going back to it ever since my adolescence, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped by the surprises of its plot; and since it’s a book that I could read just for the pleasure of its invention, without having to delve into its erudite conundrums, I could allow myself to drift peacefully away in the story’s flow, in the wake of the noble knight and his faithful sidekick. To my first high school reading of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have added many other readings over the years, undertaken in all sorts of places and moods. To those I can now add a medicinal Don Quixote, both a balm and a consolation.

Approaching his second hospital stay, Manguel works out a formula of sorts to assure a “companionable variety” of books, drawing from each of four categories: “a miscellany,” “a meditative work,” “a book to make me smile,” and “a collection of poetry.” It's a lovely way to approach a down-time reading list, though I might have to add a fifth category: "trashy mystery novel."

Source: Geist 

Ever feel like you’re trapped in the city, exiled from your natural home in the wilds, longing for some deeper connection with nature? Yeah, me too. That’s why I’ve been enjoying Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness (Little, Brown), which encourages us to attune ourselves to the wildlife that exists even in our paved and mowed urban landscapes. Haupt uses crows as a spirit-guide into the natural world, which goes against her instincts because a) she has a clear aversion to too much “woo-woo” talk and a hesitance to anthropomorphize, b) she sees the abundance of crows as an indicator of ecological imbalance, and c) as she states flat-out in the opening line, “Crows are not my favorite bird.”

Nonetheless, Haupt is irresistibly drawn to crows as she shakes off something that sounds like not just urban ennui but clinical depression. Getting herself out of her funk, she begins to explore her nearby Seattle environs with the expertise of an experienced birder, the sharp eye of an all-around naturalist, and the literary mind of a probing essayist:

When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter. Jennifer Price writes in Flight Maps, her eloquent critique of romanticized nature, that modern Americans use an idea of Nature Out There to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources. “If I don’t think of a Volvo as nature, then can’t I buy and drive it to Nature without thinking very hard about how I use, alter, destroy, and consume nature?” In my urban ecosystem, I drive around a corner and a crow leaps into flight from the grassy parking strip. We startle each other. If nature is Out There, she asks, then what am I?

Source: Little, Brown

The people at the Second Pass are looking for a fight. They've named ten books they want "fired from the canon." Who gets kicked to the curb? Not a lightweight among them: Faulkner, García Márquez, Kerouac, Dos Passos, Franzen...

The creators of the blacklist explain themselves:

If you’re looking for reading suggestions in bulk, you’re spoiled for choice ... but a problem arises: Such guides are presumably meant to save readers time by pointing them in the right direction, but the guides themselves amount to several months or years of reading. The books they recommend add up to several lifetimes. What starts as an attempt to save hours ends as a commitment to more hours than you probably have.

Have a look for yourself. It's a fun read, and if these people can be trusted, it may just change your life. Sort of.

Source: Second Pass 

Image by  austinevan , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Angela’s Ashes, was Daniel Radosh’s high school English teacher. After McCourt died last week, Radosh—himself an author of the book Rapture Ready—wrote a funny and beautiful eulogy to his former teacher on his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Beyond the practical lessons I learned in Frank McCourt's class, I'll always remember him as a model for how to be cynical without being jaded and sarcastic without being inhumane. I'm pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife, but he had to believe that there is an immortality in living so that your words and actions transform the world around you in ways that will continue to reverberate forever. No one with so much life in him can ever truly die. And if there were an afterlife, I can guarantee you that somewhere right now, Frank McCourt would be mightily pissed off that he's not around for what's sure to be a hell of a wake.

Radosh was kind enough to sit down with Utne Reader last year to talk about Christian rock music that doesn’t suck.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Source: Radosh.net

Image by  David Shankbone , licensed under  Creative Commons .  

“If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?” asks  David L. Ulin in the 2009 music issue of the Believer. “I’ve been asking myself this question off and on since I was a teenager.” There’s no answer, of course, so he invented one.

Any invented record has to make sense as a Beatles album, to reflect the amalgam the band was, the formulas on which they relied. For all their innovations, the Beatles were formulaic as well, building albums that had a standard architecture (one or two songs from George, a balance of John and Paul, and a quick dash of Ringo). You can’t forget that when considering what they might have done.

After taking readers on a tour of post-breakup Beatle solo albums, Ulin fashions four hypothetical Beatles albums. Here’s one:

Too Many People

SIDE ONE

Imagine (John)
Crippled Inside (John)
It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo, cowritten with George)
Teddy Boy (Paul)
All Things Must Pass (George)
Another Day (Paul)

 SIDE TWO

Too Many People (Paul)
Jealous Guy (John)
Gimme Some Truth (John)
Awaiting on You All (George)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Paul)
Monkberry Moon Delight (Paul)

We needed to hear this hypothetical blockbuster, so we brought it to life over at imeem. Enjoy:

Image by Chamko Rani, licensed under Creative Commons.

You're a foreign journalist locked up in a notorious Iranian prison facing espionage charges, how do you pass the time? You ask your interrogators for their reading suggestions, of course! That's what Iason Athanasiadis did, and now that he's back on the outside he's assembled a list of his interrogators' recommendations and published them at Global Post. Here's an excerpt:

Westoxification, Jalal al-e Ahmad, 1962: A recurring point of reference for my jailers, this is the pre-eminent philosophical work on which the cultural wars that followed the Iranian Revolution were conducted.

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders: Highly recommended by my interrogators as the definitive account of how the West funded leftist and right-wing intellectuals during the Cold War seeking to dissuade them from succumbing to the lure of Communism.

Death Plus Ten Years, Roger Cooper, 1995: Highly recommended by one of my interrogators, this is a memoir by a British man convicted of espionage in Iran in the 1980s who spent more than five years in jail and was exchanged for a number of Iranian prisoners with the British government. My interrogator told me that after reading it he was convinced Cooper had been a spy “because he exhibited an intelligence mentality.” He did not delve further into what is an “intelligence mentality,” presumably because he sought to establish the same parameter with me.

A Man, Oriana Fallaci, 1981: At the conclusion of my interrogation, I was told that I should not be so upset that it had dragged on for three weeks. “You shouldn’t be so negative about your experience,” the senior interrogator advised me. “Look at Oriana Fallaci, she spent so much time in prison. It formed her.”

Source: Global Post 

Image by Biggunben, licensed under Creative Commons.

Bikers are such quiet, conscientious people… er, not always. Comics artist Kenny Be has inked them as "Bike Monsters" in the pages of Westword. Check out his snide comic strip and see if you can spot a caricature you recognize. For more discussion on bikers versus the rest of the world, read Bennett Gordon's post about anti-social commuters.

Source: Westword

At its best, the Believer delivers essays and dialogues about fascinations you didn't know you had. I've walked through war zones and across four states and still I was surprised I made it to the end of a lengthy correspondence about walking. It helped that the correspondents—writers Will Self and Geoff Nicholson—were several kinds of hilarious. Forgive me, but what stuck with me and what I want to share with you now was Nicholson's list of similarities between walking and sex, which he created with the idea of "sexing up" his book The Lost Art of Walking. Here are his ruminations on the subject:

Essential similarities: They're both basic, simple, repetitive activities that just about everybody does, and yet they're both capable of great sophistication and elaboration. They can both be sources of fantastic pleasure, but there are times when they can both feel like hard work. They're both things that some people like to do alone, that some like to do with just one other person, and that others like to do in groups of various sizes. And some people like to wear special clothing while they're doing it. And then, essential differences: One: although I'm sure you can catch various diseases while you're walking, they're different from the sort you can catch while having sex. Two: whereas walking is the kind of activity that can be happily and legally undertaken in public with a dog...At that point I abandoned my ruminations; this seemed too flippant even by my standards.

Walk on...

Source: Believer 

“Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy,” according to Thomas Jefferson. In a letter written in 1787, and unearthed for the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, the founding father explains that traveling spreads a person’s affections too thin, causing deep dissatisfaction and idleness. Older, more mature people may be able to handle such a shock to the system, but young people should stay in their home countries where the pursuit of knowledge will be less “obstructed by foreign objects.”

Jefferson writes:

The glare of pomp and pleasure is analogous to the motion of the blood—it absorbs all their affection and attention, they are torn from it as from the only good in this world, and return to their home as to a place of exile and condemnation. Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives.

Source:  Lapham’s Quarterly  

Mitch Schneider was getting rid of a “sweet, ten-speed thrasher” road bike, and he decided to make hopeful riders work for it—by having them write “in exactly 20 words why you are the most-deserving candidate for my road bike, and what you plan to use it for.”

He shares a handful of responses—some goofy, some earnest—in the new issue of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, a lively, thoughtful journal that features bike-inspired essays, poetry, reviews, conversations, and more (the article is not available online). Here’s some of the “pure road poetry” that Schneider received:

I done could like this bike to fetch stuff fer me and my wench to cook our vittles real good. –O'Connell

Twenty words is hardly enough to explain how much commuting, cruising, and possibly crashing would happen if it were mine. –David P.

Help I am in need of a bike for Pops! Please help him escape loving but crazy menopausal wife. THANKS! –Sam R.

Moving from Oregon without cash for a car makes this bike an important component to my future success and happiness. –Jordan H.

stripped naked like a chop shop
and then put back together to wheel downtown
and friends in need to borrow
its no haiku, but let me know –Will B.

I would convert this bike to a fixed gear bike then learn how to perform track stands to impress friends. –Bob B.

Source: Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac 

Forget all of the life-of-a-writer garbage that pops up in blogs and on the shelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble, the fabulous Gay Talese leads by example. Here, in all of its eccentric glory, is a sketch of his workday:

Paris Review: How does your writing day begin?

Gay Talese: I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie.

PR: Cuff links?

GT: Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.

PR:  Again?

GT: That’s right. I have an ascot and sweaters. I have a scarf.

PR:  Do you like that the bunker doesn’t have windows?

GT: Yes. There are no doors, no time. It used to be a wine cellar.

PR:  How do you write?

GT: Longhand at first. Then I use the typewriter.

PR: You never write directly onto the computer?

GT: Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work slowly because I don’t want to get too much on paper. By the end of the morning I might have a page, which I will pin up above my desk.

PR: Surely there must be some days in the middle of a project, when you’re really going, that you write more than a single page.

GT: No, there aren’t.

Source: Paris Review 

Image by Joyce Tenneson.  

In the latest issue of Meatpaper, Chris Ying deconstructs our love for watching men masticate curious things on television. His equation—dubbed the "unattractive men/unattractive meat narrative" or "UM/UM"—is this: “the weirder-looking you are, the weirder the food you have to eat.” He writes, rather scathingly, that UM/UM explains why “an acid-washed porcupine” like Guy Fieri is forced to scarf the slickest, homeliest burgers in the country (though he seems to dig it), while bitsy Giada De Laurentiis tucks away much tidier pieces of chicken and the occasional mini meatball. After grappling briefly with the consequences of his media equation, Ying has these final words:

In all honesty, we can’t really blame television for overfishing, or for lousy, overpriced renditions of street food in upscale restaurants. Nor can we blame TV for aspiring housewives lusting after organic home gardens and Hamptons beach houses. It’d be like blaming porn for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. It’s all just entertainment. And at the end of the day, food television, like porn, is irrevocably and essentially unsatisfying. They keep turning us on, but we keep watching, mouths watering and agape in horror.

Source: Meatpaper

Image by sashafatcat, licensed under Creative Commons.

Pop songs romanticizing murder and corruption among drug cartels and federales (Mexican national police) have been a staple in Mexican culture since the '60s, writes William T. Vollmann in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

Through a series of intimate encounters, Vollmann explores the complicated role the baladas prohibidas, or narcocorridos, play in the lives of people in Mexico, many of whom understandably vilify corrupt authorities and uphold drug lords as idyllic figures of honor and bravery, seemingly without a sense of fear for their own lives. But recently balladas prohibidas have come under fire, and even been banned from certain Mexican radio stations and outlawed altogether in Baja California. He writes:

The policeman Carlos Pérez said that some of the most famous ballads were about Jesús Malverde, whom he called the patron saint of the narcotraffickers. He lived in Sinaloa. He was Robin Hood. He sold drugs and used the money to help the people. He was killed in a gun battle because he didn't want to give himself up. Some say he was never caught. Some say he died of old age, and others say that he is still alive. Everybody has his own story

Below are some popular narcocorridos we dug up from YouTube.

Source: Mother Jones, YouTube 

Image biy DavidDennis, licensed under Creative Commons.

The good people at the mortality-centric website Obit scan death notices in newspapers far and wide. It’s a respectable mission, especially when it turns up gems like the obituary for “teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper” Nancy Hixson. Want to know how to write an obituary? You can read the entire notice over at Obit. Don’t settle for this irresistible and inspiring taste:

(NANCY) LEE HIXSON of Danville, Ohio died at sunrise on June 30, 2009 … In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone's tea. She often volunteered as an ombudsman to help disadvantaged teens find college funding and early opened her home to many children of poverty, raising several of them to successful, if unwilling, adulthood … She was the CEO of the Cuyahoga Valley Center of Outdoor Leadership Training, where she lived in a remote and tiny one-room cabin in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Despite the lack of cabin space and dining table, she often served holiday dinners to friends and relatives and could seat twenty at the bed. She lived the last twenty-three years at Winter Spring Farm near Danville where she built a private Stonehenge, and planted and helped save from extinction nearly 50 varieties of antique apple trees, many listed in A.J. Downing's famous orchard guide of 1859 … She was predeceased by her father Dwight Edward Wood of the Ohio pioneer Wood family of Byhalia, who died in the Columbus Jail having been accused of a dreadful crime … Cremation has taken place. In lieu of flowers, please pray for the Constitution of the United States. 

Onward Nancy Hixson, wherever you are.

Source: Obit 

Last year there were more than 275,000 new books published in the United States. That got Virginia Quarterly Review’s Jacob Silverman thinking: does every book deserve a review? His answer, in short, is a resounding no, which begs a better question: how does a reviewer find the books best suited to her tastes and critical talents?

The challenge for book-review outlets is to sort through the mass of unsolicited books that arrives every day, the e-mails from authors and PR reps, and the various other articles and notifications announcing the publication of new and interesting titles. Of course, the large publishing houses have an advantage in getting their books into the hands of reviewers and assigning editors, but even they struggle to get their authors the attention they very likely deserve.  With that in mind, what is the best way to connect editors and writers with the books that interest them?

And that conversation begs a better question still: who do you trust in the vast but receding world of book reviews? What publications? What critics?

“Most writers put a lot of time, heart, passion, and effort into their books,” writes Silverman. “Editors and critics should do the same when considering what and how they review.”

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

Fourth of July reading:

Oooh, Ahhh, Argghh: Hatin’ on Fireworks

Unsupervised Children Twirl Firecrackers on a String!

Other good stuff:

Unearthed: Spalding Gray Interviews the Dalai Lama This 1991 conversation is colored by the kind of blunt truths Gray was famous for. It's a great exploration of the fundamental tenets of Tibeten Buddhism, and it's also hilarious.

Digging the Continuous Light Christian Hits : Christian radio is becoming less, well, Christian.

Google What Do the Modern Corporation and the Christian Megachurch Have in Common?: Lots, it turns out.

Exhuming Ayn Rand: What’s up with all the Ayn Rand love we’re seeing lately?

Strange Rugs Depict Decades of War in Afghanistan: Afghanistan's epic battle against Soviet occupation spawned an unusual genre of war story

Live, Nude Farming : Gross.

The Illuminati of the Film Downloading World: Invite-only film downloading clubs hide in the darkest, most exclusive corners of the internet.

Thirteen-Year-Old Brings Back the Walkman: Thirteen-year-old Scott Campbell recently gave up his iPod for a week, opting instead to use his dad’s clunky old Sony Walkman.

Young People Write About Mental Illness: These young writers are incredibly straightforward and honest about their experiences with childhood abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenia.

Image by  nextartist , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The new issue of Represent, a magazine by and for young people in foster care, focuses on mental illness. It makes for some pretty heavy reading—these young writers are incredibly straightforward and honest about their experiences with childhood abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenia—but it’s a vital source of voices and perspectives that are normally absent from discussions of mental illness.

Source: Represent 

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) will be published without an evolving list of seemingly passé entries, which includes; tulip, melon, acorn, fungus, cheetah, leopard, beaver, otter and magpie, among many others. The dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), is perpetuating a bleak world without violets, bluebells or passenger pigeons, writes Robert Michael Pyle in the July issue of Orion. But there are plenty of blackberries there (and not the kind you eat.) He writes:

On the other hand, in OJD-world you’ll have no trouble locating blogs or chatrooms. Celebrities are there, spending euros. You can check your broadband MP3 player and send attachments with bullet points, all while bungee jumping if you so desire…

OUP responded that the volume must be kept small for small hands, so when new words are added to keep up with the times, old words must come out. Sharp howls of protest arose from people who hold to the quaint belief that an essential societal good comes from young people getting to know –or at least know about—their natural surroundings.

Also on the chopping block— canary, lark, dandelion, lavender, willow, weasel, porcupine, fern, beech, sycamore, pelican, starling and stork.

Source:  Orion  (article not yet available online)

Image by  YoungLadAustin , licensed under Creative Commons.  

The Atlantic claims your summer cocktail could benefit from gourmet ice. Are you rolling your eyes? Well, when Wayne Curtis investigated the issue, mixologist Toby Maloney clued him in: “Ice is as important to a bartender as a stove is to a chef.” He goes on to say that, “You’d never tell a chef he could have only a stove-top burner or a fryer. And I couldn’t do without at least three or four different types of ice.”

In fact, fancy ice can range in style from standard crushed ice, to chunk ice that must be chipped and shaped, to “oblong blocks that fit perfectly into a Collins glass.” Each drink, in turn, requires a different sort to suit its chilling needs. Curtis himself is clearly a convert, and performs his own experiment between a drink made with “cheater ice” and one made with the good stuff. According to him, if you’re looking for “a richer taste” and “a denser, almost velvety texture,” choose your ice wisely, friend.

Source: Atlantic 

Image by Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson, licensed under Creative Commons. 

All over Iraq, American forces are striking camp and withdrawing from cities. Blogging for the Atlantic, Graeme Wood offers a snapshot of the withdrawal, with an eye for the details most news reports leave out:

The only thing uglier than a military base is a military base that is being torn down. Camp Tash is nearly gone, and it is already half landfill and all eyesore. While walking around I tallied the objects buried in the sand: a leather sandal, frayed coaxial cables, many plastic bags, scattered live 5.56mm rounds, plastic bottles galore.

And stacks of old wood are everywhere. The Marines' weapon of choice is the crowbar, with a claw-hammer for a sidearm. They crawl over SWA huts, ripping out plywood and wearing rifle vests if they rise above the berm and into the sights of potential snipers. In the middle of the afternoon, three Iraqis show up, one in a police uniform, with a truck. They scavenge as much wood as they can carry. One of them, Adnan Yusuf, is plump and huffs smoke through the gaps in his teeth. He is smiling, because there's money in that wreckage. “Business is good," he says. "I just spent three months tearing apart bases in Hit and Ramadi.”

Source: The Atlantic 

Jeanne Bogino, a librarian in New Lebanon, New York, shares a host of zombie-lit recommendations in Library Journal, with a fabulous, well-rounded list that’s likely to whet lots of appetites for gory summer reading.

Bonus: Bogino also cobbles together a great list of zombie movies, and a Library Journal colleague contributes an eclectic “zombie reading soundtrack.”

Source: Library Journal 

(Thanks, @leekinginc.)

For those who want spicier love lives, or at to least read about them, novelist Ewan Morrison has compiled a top ten list of his favorite literary ménages à trois for The Guardian. Writes Morrison: 

The ménage à trois is a rich and rarified fictional seam which arose in the 19th century and originated from memoirs or fictionalised accounts of real-life events.The number of ménages à trois (as yet barely documented) which occurred in the lives of artists, writers and leaders from the 19th century to the present day – from DH Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw to Pablo Picasso and Jack Kerouac – is intriguing, and begs the question: was the ménage à trois the ideal (if publicly unacceptable) lifestyle of the modern 'radical'?

His list includes the following high-profile threesomes:

1) Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. This erotic and allegedly autobiographical novel tells the story of a writer, his wife, and the young woman they share.

2) A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. Eventually made into a film with Colin Farrell, this novel by the author of The Hours is about a gay man, his female friend, and their bisexual lover in the era of AIDS.

3) Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg by Carolyn Cassady. The story behind the story of On the Road, as told by the woman who was Neal Cassady’s wife and Jack Kerouac’s lover.

4) Henry and June from the diary of Anaïs Nin. You’ve probably seen the movie, but have you read Nin’s actual accounts of her affair with Henry Miller and his wife June?

5) The Book of Genesis from the Bible. Morrison writes:

In the garden there were not two but three. The temptation of the apple was adultery, and Adam tasted it too. Thus began monogamy and a long history in which couples blamed each other for something involving a third party who was then kept out of the picture. The eradication of the third – this was the original sin.

(Thanks, Bookslut.)

Source: The Guardian

Image by mthaeg, licensed under Creative Commons

The great migration from print to digital has indelibly changed the written word and the people who create it. “It's not journalism we're losing, any more than it was agriculture or steel,” former newspaper editor Bob Sheasley writes in the new issue of Lost.

The online magazine’s new issue, Lost in Print, explores what is slipping away as writers stumble toward digital. “Writers are adapting to new platforms and quieter newsrooms, but writers are writers — out there in the world, taking it all in, putting it into words for us to read,” the editors note reads. “On that front, nothing's changing.”

Visiting the broken-down steel towns or the once-vibrant newsrooms, Sheasley expresses a different sentiment. Journalism and steel haven’t gone away, but there’s no doubt that something has been lost.

Source: Lost 

Image by  Adam Tinworth , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The Virginia Quarterly Review has posted our favorite Iran reading list yet. It includes a graphic novel (guess), a book of 60,000 rhyming couplets, a work of admirable political and religious history, and a memoir called Funny in Farsi. "No one book could ever hope to encompass an entire country, let alone one as complex and multi-faceted as Iran," writes Michael Lukas. "But if you read these four, you’ll be on your way to understanding the home to 66 million people, eight major ethnic groups, seven languages, five religions, and thousands of years of history."

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

Right now I’m killing the third person. With this very blog post, I am contributing to the sneaky, first-person narrative trend that currently runs our written world (and by reading this, so are you). According to Nathaniel G. Moore in Broken Pencil, we’ve all been too busy talking about ourselves to notice the third person slipping beneath the pages of time.

Moore investigates the opinions of several literary aces and provides a multi-faceted look at why we're  so obsessed with “I” these days. Here are a few of their thoughts:

Writers don’t seem to want the excess baggage of a big, baggy, third person story or novel. The standard compulsions of the third person author seem outdated, less cheeky and immediate, than the prattle of a typical first person present narrator. —Spencer Gordon

Lately I have been seduced by the first-person siren song, because for some reason this point of view lets me write meaner people, which is exciting since I usually go for characters on the nicer end of the spectrum. —Jessica Westhead

When people write about what they know, they install themselves in the story with devastating first person results. It comes down to laziness. Pure and utter laziness. —Gradey Alexander

Source: Broken Pencil 

Image by My Buffo, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Trees of all sizes loom large in the world of Linda Underhill, the author of the new book The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests (Oregon State University). Underhill’s writing is clear, crisp literary journalism, moving with an understated grace as she covers specific types of forests, from rainforests to urban woodlands to the threatened hemlocks of Appalachia. Her writing on old-growth forests displays her deft touch:

Compared to tree plantations or woodlands managed for growing a certain kind of timber, the old-growth forest is an incoherent prayer, devout but disorganized, oblivious to any demands but its own growth and decay. This sacred chaos holds the key to natural processes scientists are eager to study, but there are few places left where people have not already altered their rhythms or otherwise destroyed the evidence of creation at work. The valuable timber in old-growth forests, where trees grow hundreds of feet tall and many feet around, has proved irresistible to those who know the price such wood can bring. But an old-growth forest also offers something less easy to price in the marketplace. It invites us to witness the miracle of creation and change the way we look at our own short lives. The tall trees inspire a reverence equal to any of our own great cathedrals, and they belong only to themselves. Chopping down old-growth trees and hauling them away seems akin to scattering the stones of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and selling them off as souvenirs.

I read the book last week while camping for a few days in the Midwest: first under a giant oak in the Mississippi bottomlands, then beneath the canopy of a maple forest, and finally under a small grove of black walnuts. My copy is a bit dog-eared, having been dripped on by rain-soaked maples and showered with pollen-filled oak catkins. But somehow I suspect the author wouldn't mind.

Source: The Way of the Woods

The relationship between Salt Lake City and its non-Mormon inhabitants is a curious one. Scott Carrier—whose distinctive, wavering monotone has been an NPR cornerstone for more than two decades—delivers a lovely soliloquy about the Stockholm syndrome-esque attachment he has for his hometown in the Spring ’09 issue of the High Desert Journal.

I’ve tried to leave, many times, but I always come back. Now, after living here for nearly 50 years, I’m starting to realize I need to see these mountains, the central Wasatch. Lone Peak, Twin Peaks, Mt. Olympus. I need to watch how they change shape with the light in order for my mind to stay calm. On a clear morning after a snow storm they rise up like a wave about to crash down on the city, in the summer haze they are so small and far away. Up there with tundra grass and mountain goats, limber pines on the ridge lines, walls of white granite 800 feet tall that turn the sky beyond dark blue. I need to be up there, looking back down on the city, with skis attached to my feet, in order to feel at home. 

Laced within Carrier’s beautiful descriptions of the city itself, is the fascinating narrative and sometimes problematic beliefs on which the Mormon faith is based. And true to Carrier form, there is a touch of desert-dry humor involved.

They told me they’d been baptized in the Temple, and now they were going to a different heaven than I was. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, but unless I converted and got baptized the best I could hope for was the second level, which wasn’t bad, and even the lowest level was so good I would kill myself right now just to get there if I knew how good it was, or is.  

Source: High Desert Journal (full text not available online)

Image by  Edgar Zuniga Jr. , licensed under Creative Commons.

The New York Times’ audience, erudite as they may be, can still be stumped by words like “antediluvian,” “sumptuary,” or “hagiography.” The newspaper of record recently gave reporters a glimpse into which words confuse their readers the most when they gave Nieman Journalism Lab a list of the 50 most looked-up words on their website.

A (rather annoying) feature on NYTimes.com allows readers to look up a word, simply by double clicking the text on their computers. Using data from that function, the paper released an internal memo, gently urging editors to shy away from words like “louche,” which editors managed to use 27 times so far this year.

In the memo, deputy news editor Philip Corbett reminded writers and editors that readers “probably don’t carry an unabridged dictionary along with the newspaper as they take the subway to work. And they don’t expect a news article to pose the same linguistic challenge as Finnegans Wake.”

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab

Just in time for summer, The Believer recommends eleven essential nonexistent books for your reading lists. Perfect for anyone who’s looking to either not read or imagine to read. Here are a few hilarious examples with descriptions:

1) Fibre Strands of Luxurious Abrasion (nonfiction), by Simon Gaspeth. “Surfaces—cheap carpet, a linoleum countertop after bread has been sliced, wet Astroturf—are what interest Gaspeth, an essayist and lecturer in material culture at King’s College London.”

2) Whole Hog (nonfiction), by Arthur Allens. The author “shows his willingness to stare his meat in the face as he follows a single Iowa pig from his first day’s suckling, through his corn-dosed adolescence, to his ultimate fate: divvied up among Korean wholesalers, makers of artisanal bacon, and an agribusiness conglomerate that serves what’s left of him back to his brethren.”

3) The Men Who Pour Cement (fiction), by Kimball MacAleese. “MacAleese is the great also-ran of the twentieth-century American letters, behind his contemporaries Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—whom he once challenged to ‘write about your own g-damn country, and let the matadors and spaghetti-eaters write about theirs.’”

4) Workshop (fiction), by Nick Lowey. “MFA students writing—and failing to write—form the subject of Lowey’s debut...Lowey displays an enviable judiciousness and a keen eye: a box of cheap wine is described as ‘a store-brand Lethe, a vermillion river of solace and forgetting.’”

Source: The Believer

Chronogram is a luscious magazine, its 10-by-13 inch pages filled with articles that “nourish and support the creative, cultural, and economic life of the Hudson Valley.” One of its latest efforts in that vein—which non-Hudson Valley residents will have no problem enjoying—is a delightful 2009 Summer Reading Roundup for kids (from picture books to young-adult readers). Compiled by Susan Krawitz, Anne Pyburn, and Nina Shengold, the reading list is a smorgasbord of intriguing suggestions for children. Enjoy.

Source: Chronogram

Increasingly, we are a global community of migrants. In this era of unprecedented mobility, boundaries seem more permeable, and indeed arbitrary, than ever.

Enter the hybrid. Not the car, the literary genre. Are genre categories like poetry and prose just so 20^th Century? The spring issue of Dislocate magazine seems to say, yes. The editors have put together a collection of prose poems, lyric essays, and flash fiction that address the theme of migration through either form or content. By resisting proscribed boundaries, the writing opens up new possibilities in form and content.

Take Gregg Willard’s “Pop”, which gleefully straddles the line between poetry and prose.  It begins:

When I was a boy my father told me, “If you go to any more movies, you’re going to turn into a movie.” I kept going to movies. When I turned into a movie it turned out to be a Japanese science-fiction movie. The dubbing was very bad...

“We are interested in work that addresses form but also breaks away from it,” says Editor-in-chief Shantha Susman. “What does it mean to dislocate, to take it away from its natural place?”

The issue features poetry by Peter Johnson, Nin Andrews, and Todd Boss, an interview with author Ethan Canin, a never-before-published English translation of Haitian poet Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier by Gabrielle Civil, and gorgeous photos by Kyle Rand.

Also featured is work by women of Chicago’s Grace House, a transitional facility for women recently released from prison. For this collaborative project between The Field Museum and Northwestern University, Grace House residents wrote responses to painter Jacob Lawrence’s “The Great Migration” series, which portrays the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the early 20^th Century. Their powerful, spare prose speaks to the unstable nature of migration.

As resident Racheal M. Harris writes, “Don’t ever be afraid of change—ain’t nothing constant but change.”  

Source: Dislocate (full text not available online)

Images courtesy of Dislocate and Kyle Rand

Oh the balcony. It’s an iconic symbol that takes on nuanced incarnations that span cites, countries and cultures. From giant, barred bird-cage like enclosures to tiny stucco patios housing plants, the spaces differ both in form and function. The recent issue of Canada’s maisonneuve featured some beautiful images and a little ode to the “lost art of balcony culture,” with some lovely observations:  

They’re a bridge between the private and the public, inviting domestic activity into the street and social life into the home. If the city is a stage, the balcony is just that—the balcony, a spot for observing drama and, as with the two old men in The Muppet Show, occasionally participating in it. And balconies are unique in every city. In Vancouver’s West End, where apartment buildings nestle into lush greenery, they are for quiet post-dinner conversation and solitary reading. Neighbors are glimpsed, voyeuristically, but interaction is rare. In the coastal Indian city of Chennai…mothers to warn their daughters against spending too much time on the balcony.

Here in Minnesota, as in Montreal, we’re just happy for warm enough weather to step out on ours to do anything.

Source: maisonneuve (not yet available online)

Image by david.nikonvscanon, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Behold the capercaillie, a large, elusive grouse that’s the object of much bird-watching lust across the pond. So much so, in fact, that when Victoria James sets out to spot it in the forests of Scotland, she finds the 5:30 a.m. trail crowded with hyper-competitive birders in earnest (read: non-communal) search of same. Her tale, shared in the British current affairs magazine New Statesman, is really quite funny, in particular her sharp, somewhat scientific description of her fellow bird-devotees:

For this is the dark secret of birders, normally the most affable people alive: Until the target has been spotted, it’s every man for himself. Like the object of his fascination, the male birder is both competitive and highly territorial. In the hide this morning, a successful breeding male (the dowdier female and offspring huddle nearby) has staked a prime position for his scope. Behind him, a thwarted smaller male gives a hopping, ducking display of frustration. This is war, except that all the scopes, lined up like Gatling guns, are pointing in the same direction.

Source: New Statesman 

Image by Richard Bartz, licensed under Creative Commons.

Anyone can be a bad travel writer. It’s as easy as using clichés, not quoting locals, and writing about your husband Larry as much as possible. David Farley, who’s clearly read a few too many bad travel articles, gives a few tips on World Hum about how to create the worst, most unenlightening, hackneyed travel writing ever. Here’s one of his tips:

Tell, don’t show. Sure, you could write something like, “We traipsed across the chunky cobblestones of the village’s only lane, flanked by half-timbered, thatched-roof houses, and we could smell the morning’s first offerings from the village bakery.” But why, when you could just as easily write, “The village was quaint and charming”?

Source: World Hum

There’s a forgotten world that lies beyond the tourist maps and double-decker bus tours of New York City. For the latest issue of A Public Space, John Wray and Matt Dojny take readers on an illustrated tour of impossible sites that aren’t endorsed by the New Your City Department of Tourism. The Interbourogh Rapid Transit Company’s abandoned City Hall Station (above) can be found by riding the subway one stop past the end of the 6 line. While location of the Home of Tomorrow, built 15 feet underground for the 1964-65 World’s Fair, remains a mystery.  

Source:  A Public Space  

Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal, the incoming U.S. commander in Afghanistan, eats just one meal per day. He is called an ascetic and a “soldier monk” in his disregard for the earthly pleasures of three-meal days. Writing for the Morning News, Mike Smith tried to emulate McChrystal’s routine by skipping breakfast, lunch, and all between-meal snacking for one week. He doesn’t make it all the way through to his goal, but the effort makes for an amusing read. Here’s an excerpt: 

I probably deserve rebuke from nutritionists, but global security rests on the shoulder of a man who only eats one meal a day! It’s my duty as a concerned citizen to test his methods. Unless McChrystal spends much of the day snacking, I imagine that after he consumes his single meal, he too must need to sleep. But I can’t quite picture him giving heed to fatigue.

In his command roles, says the Washington Post, McChrystal “favors flatter, faster organizations and is known for preferring a small staff that is overworked rather than a large one that has time to grow unfocused.” His asceticism isn’t just eclecticism, but a managerial style and a dieting method, even a productivity seminar. I see a self-help book on the horizon.

Source: The Morning News 

Busy executives don’t have time to fire all the employees they need to in the midst of this financial crisis, and human resources departments can be expensive. Writing for McSweeney’s, Marco Kaye came up with the idea of a Netflix-style service called Netloss, where execs can send pink slips automatically through the mail. Managers create a queue of all their employees, and Netloss will fire them automatically. No late fees, and no need for a messy talks. There’s even a program that can suggest other employees to fire based on your firing habits and preferences.

The service sounds like a great idea, but it lacks that personal touch that only a trained HR professional can provide. In an episode of This American Life, Ira Glass sat down with someone who has fired more than 1,500 people. He never uses the term “fired” in fact. Instead, people are “exited” or “part of that downsizing” or there is simply “a parting of the ways.”

Image by  vm2827 , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Sources: McSweeney’s, This American Life

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Afraid of Mice?
The International Society for Human Rights has created a compelling collection of posters depicting the threat of cyber dissent to regimes with a less-than-friendly disposition towards free expression.

My Wind Turbine is Bigger Than Yours
"A green building is green because it’s compact and resource-efficient, because it’s healthy, and because it’s stingy on water use. The heavy lifting in green design has to come from these measures, not from the window dressing."

Bionic Beetles, Spy Cats, and Other Military Critters
Researchers have tricked out a beetle with tiny electrodes that allow them to control its flight. Next step: Outfitting the insect with onboard sensors that relay information back to mission control. Hello, coleopteran espionage!

Fatherhood is Good for Your Brain
While recent studies show that pregnancy and childbirth positively alter the brain chemistry of mothers, could parenting have a similar impact on men?

The Smartest Videos on the Web
It’s tough to find intelligent and educational videos among the teeming masses of cat movies and puppy cams that clutter the web.

When Volunteerism is Like Slavery
Conservatives are going apoplectic over the whiff of a national service plan in the United States.

The Lost Art of Lettering
Hand-lettering extraordinaire Alison Carmichael, has made a name for herself by producing elegantly-scribed messages.

A Guided Tour of David Byrne's Insane Office
A three part audio and photo tour of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s enormous workspace. Byrne’s commentary is fabulous. Enjoy.

The Art of the Literary Introduction
"Once, the person introducing me bit his tongue so badly that blood poured over his necktie onto the index card on which he had inscribed my entire life."

Inside the Tank at Tiananmen Square
A new look at the famous "Tank Man" standoff in 1989.

Street lit, ghetto lit, urban fiction, gangsta lit—these are the various names given to the genre that exploded onto the literary scene starting with rapper Sister Souljah’s 1999 debut, The Coldest Winter Ever. Since then street lit has become one of the fastest growing book genres in the U.S., according to the urban fiction website streetfiction.org. Almah LaVon Rice reports for Colorlines that street lit’s meteoric ascendance over the past decade has cultural critics debating its merits and mainstream publishers salivating over its sales potential.

Urban fiction consistently appears on Essence magazine’s bestseller list, which tracks black bookstores, although Rice reports that even more street lit is sold via barber shops, beauty salons, sidewalk kiosks, and online. Characterized by “unapologetic materialism and luxury brand fetishes, explicit sex and violence, and profanities that flow as freely as Cristal on VIP nights,” street lit has been credited with drawing formerly new communities into reading. It’s become so popular that even rapper 50 Cent has his own imprint, G-Unit Books.

But critics contend that the line between representation and exploitation is blurry, and that street lit could be feeding stereotypes and promoting a destructive way of life. Still others point out that, as with hip-hop, many consumers of street lit have no direct experience with the urban lifestyle it chronicles.

It’s not surprising that publishing bigwigs like Kensington Books, Simon & Schuster, and St. Martin’s now have their own urban fiction divisions, which begs the question that Paul Chaat Smith raises in his essay “Why Indians Love the Movies So Much”: What happens when mainstream media controls and defines the images of marginalized groups? 

Source: Colorlines

Here’s a video of wildly popular street lit author Teri Woods, talking about how she hustled her books into bestsellers:

It’s no easy task, setting the stage for a literary speaker. You want to be eloquent, informative, admiring, perhaps a bit witty; you want to please both the audience (who haven’t come to see you) and the writer in question (who has probably heard some slight variation of what you’re saying a hundred times or more).

The writer and poet Paul West explores this “ancient little-honored literary form” in an entertaining essay for Gargoyle magazine (issue #53, not available online). West, who has written more than 20 books and, I’m guessing, been the subject of more than a few introductions over the years, shares some tales from the trenches.

Once, the person introducing me bit his tongue so badly that blood poured over his necktie onto the index card on which he had inscribed my entire life. Another time, one of the more combative younger poets introduced a colleague in terms so stark and acidulous the speaker seemed struck dumb: ‘If I were you,” our host opined, “I’d go do something else, not listen to this genius’s gibberish; he screws better than he writes.”

On the other hand, West notes, there are those whose introductions outshine the actual speaker, such as the writer and essayist Stanley Elkin, who was known for giving introductions “of such glistening eloquence, such magisterial authority, such daunting length, that the speaker, humbled, only mumbled, aching to get off and away, not having been warned what he/she would have to follow.”

. . . William H. Gass used to do a similar thing, reading an introduction even more resplendent than anything of Elkin’s, achieving something between encyclopedia entry and red-hot book review, leaving you more or less to flounder (or shine) in the afterglow, but with one big plus: he left behind him a cloud of menthol and eucalyptus from the big toffee on which he had sucked to clear his tubes. So, even as you trotted up into that aroma and began, your sinuses behaved and you excelled. Or, choked by newly descended phlegm, you choked on your finest phrases.

Source: Gargoyle 

Image by PaulTCowan, licensed under Creative Commons.

The story of the death and burial and 15-year-old Delvon Reshad Butts, published in Baltimore’s Urbanite, ought to be read aloud in every journalism school classroom in America. Reporter Martha Thomas begins her piece with Delvon’s murder on the sidewalk around the corner from his house and somehow, without ever loosening her grip on that unspeakable tragedy, she writes of the conflicting theologies of a mourning mother and a preachy pastor; the brutal economics of burial for poor people; and African-American mourning rituals. Stories like Delvon’s are often exploited by ratings-crazy television news crews or quick hit newspaper coverage. Martha Thomas spent months with this story and it shows. You’ll have a hard time convincing me of the imminent demise of journalism so long as reporters and storytellers like Martha Thomas walk the streets.

Source: Urbanite

Image by Christopher Myers. 

The wisdom of the masses has proven helpful creating encyclopedias (Wikipedia), digitizing books (reCaptcha), and founding a religion. When it comes to book writing and editing, however, that wisdom looks pretty dumb. Tech guru Lawrence Lessig tried updating his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by releasing it as a wiki. After the project was over, he told the ABA Journal:

“I don’t think I’ll ever write a book that way again,” he confesses. “It’s very, very hard. It’s much harder to write a book with collaborative editing than it is just to write the book.”

Source: ABA Journal 

When you write do you need to sit at a desk? Or, are you a lie-on-the-bed, laptop-on-your-chest kind of writer? George Pendle writes for Cabinet that when Gustave Flaubert declared “One cannot think and write except when seated”, it so inflamed Friedrich Nietzsche that he attacked Flaubert in his book Twilight of the Idols: “There I have caught you nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”

Nietzsche’s rant against what he perceived as cultural decadence sparked a debate about the ideal physical mode for inspiration that has spilled into our modern ideas about work. Hemingway proclaimed that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” He was joined by Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll in his Nietzschean preference for active creativity. But Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote liked to write while lying down. Indeed, Capote called himself a “completely horizontal writer.”

In 1968 designer Bob Probst unwittingly echoed Nietzsche when he bemoaned the grid-like layout of American office spaces, which “blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.” So, he designed the Action Office System, whose moveable partitions were intended to inspire workers to stand and move around. When it came to the link between creativity and physical engagement, it seemed, Nietzsche was right.

However, the ideas behind the Action Office System were quickly co-opted into a means for cramming as many workers as possible into one space. The dream of active work turned into the dreaded cubicle. Sedentary inspiration, it seems, has prevailed.

Sources: Cabinet, The Rumpus (reprinted original article, which is otherwise not available online) 

In the populist rage boiling over about the economic crisis, Michael Lukas on the VQR blog points out that the phrase “pound of flesh” has been perverted by the mainstream press. The quote from Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene III, literally means to “demand the repayment of a debt, no matter how much suffering it will cost the debtor,” according to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. It is not a small price to pay, as Steven Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times: 

Treasury officials thought they would carefully exact only a pound of flesh from Wall Street by letting Lehman fail, helping teach other investment banks not to take excessive risks. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it turned out not to be a pound of flesh that was taken. It was a ton.’  

Literary minds should forgive Greenhouse for his offense against Shakespeare. Forgiveness, according to the play’s Portia, “is twice blest, It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.”

Source: VQR Blog 

Smokers are often viewed with a mixture of pity and shame. People have known that cigarettes are harmful for decades, but many refuse to quit. “We are shunned, shamed, and ashamed,” Amy Atkins writes for Boise Weekly. “We are smokers.”

The mixture of guilt and pride felt by smokers is encapsulated by Atkins’s article. The smokers in her article know it’s dangerous, and that may have been why they started. Atkins respects the anti-smoking laws that are being passed around the country, but acknowledges the libertarian drive to keep the government out of her rights.

She also met her husband on a smoke break. Now he’s trying to quit. She writes:

The chances of him relapsing are much greater if I continue to smoke. But I'm not looking forward to being a miserable, unbearable asshole. I'm between a smoldering rock and an irritable hard place.

I'm cranky just thinking about it. I have to step outside for a minute.

Image by Porcelaingirl, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Boise Weekly

Note to Atheists: Be More Funny : Religious fundamentalists and modern atheists have something in common: Neither one can take a joke.

Anti-Semitism and the Financial Crisis: A recent Stanford study asked the question: "How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?"

Chevron Thinks You Could Do More: When we named Tzeporah Berman one of Utne Reader’s 50 Visionaries, she told us that it’s essential to transition from hyping individual green actions to pushing for large-scale, legislative change. Guess Chevron didn’t get the message.

The World's Cutest Bento Art : Feast your eyes on Makiko Ogawa’s adorable bento, which is almost too cute to eat.

Brian Mock Makes Amazing Art from Junk : Brian Mock  creates amazing sculptures from 100% recycled materials (discarded Xerox machines, sewing machines, clocks, tractors, escalators, garden tools, etc.). Lots of folks use recycled materials in their artwork, but few do it in such a refined manner.

Recycle Your Bicycle Wheels in the Garden : Organic Gardening just made this bicycle geek smile: The May 2009 issue includes simple instructions on how to convert old bike wheel rims into a support for climbing garden plants.

Dark Days for University Presses and Journals : Some of the most prestigious university journals and presses are on the chopping block, all in the name of preserving “core” academics. But what, asks Ted Genoways, defines an academic core?

Punctuation Mark News: Meet the Interrobang! : What if there were a way to merge the exlamation point and the quotation mark? You're in luck.

Sex Workers Respond to Craigslist: After considerable political wrangling, Craigslist recently announced that it was getting rid of its “erotic” services section. Instead, the website will have an “adult” services section with a more stringent screening process and a $10 fee. The sex workers who have come to rely on Criagslist for their livelihood have been largely absent from this conversation.

Netanyahu to Obama: Yoou'll Love this Book About Arab Savages : If Barack Obama ever reads that book Benjamin Netanyahu gave him, he'll be horrified. 

100 Things Everyone Should Know About Russia : You can almost see it from here, but Russia remains an enigma to many Americans, easily reduced to crude caricatures. Start filling in the Ural-sized gaps in your knowledge.

Image courtesy of  Makiko Ogawa .

Faith—how we find it, hold it, and sometimes lose it—gives people some of their finest stories to tell. And some of the best I’ve read lately are in the April issue of The Sun, in the eight-page smorgasbord that the magazine calls “Readers Write.” Yes, yes they do.

You can get a taste of Sun readers’ faith online (pdf). Of the vignettes not included in the excerpt, here are two of my favorite passages:

On a child’s decision to pursue a career in dance: “I watched my daughter dance with joy on her face, and I finally understood that to be an artist requires faith. People who paint in garrets, rehearse in walk-ups, write poetry in parks, and practice en point until their toes bleed do it because they believe in art. They believe that their passion will sustain them. And somehow it does.” —Gerry Befus  

On a sister’s joyous announcement that God has spoken to her: “When I read her e-mail, I laughed out loud. Then I felt embarrassed for her. I imagined her friends forwarding it to their co-workers for a good chuckle. Even my religious parents acknowledged it was strange. My other sibling and I still talk about her story with puzzlement and disapproval. But part of me is jealous that my sister believes in something so firmly that she doesn’t care if others laugh or not. Part of me envies the comfort she finds in God and religion. Part of me wants badly to have her faith.” —C.E.

Source: The Sun

If you love an old fashioned grammarian throw down, we've got a good one for you. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Strunk and E.B. White's The Elements of Style and  Geoffrey K. Pullum isnt celebrating.  In a delightfully vitriolic essay for The Chronicle Review, Pullum complains that the tiny guide "does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it."

Brutal. Then, in the very next breath, this: "The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead." You get the distinct sense that Pullum would have been glad to see the book buried with the men who made it. "Both authors were grammatical incompetents," he writes. "Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian."

Pullum isn't pissed about the style advice, which he calls "mostly harmless"—all of his punches are aimed squarely at the grammar rules and the grammar itself: 

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

A 50th anniversary is a big deal, and Geoffrey K. Pullum knows how to party.

Source: The Chronicle Review 

Difficult economic times have caused universities across the country to turn their budget pruning knives on some of the most prestigious journals and presses in history, all in the name of preserving “core” academics. But as Ted Genoways asks for Virginia Quarterly Review, “What—or where—exactly is a university’s academic core?”

His manifesto on the future of university presses and journals laments the short-sightedness of administrators like Michael Martin, Louisiana State University’s (LSU) new chancellor, who recently announced that he may shut down both LSU Press and Southern Review. Together these two venerable institutions boast an impressive dossier of published writers, including historians Stephen E. Ambrose and C. Vann Woodward, poets T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and authors Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. Yet, Martin has placed the press and journal on his chopping block, stating the need to “protect the academic core of LSU first and foremost.”

So, what defines a university’s academic core? Enrollment and marketability? The New York Times recently reported that enrollment in the humanities—that blanket term for history, religion, philosophy, and English—is down, and that humanities departments need to justify their existence. In a society increasingly focused on business, science, and technology, an English degree may feel more like a luxury than a necessity. Yet these days an MBA isn’t necessarily going to land you a job, either. In light of the recent economic instability, it’s a wonder that universities would let the market determine anything.

When it comes to determining a university’s academic core, cultural and historical relevance should play a factor. The work produced by LSU Press and Southern Review has undoubtedly shaped America’s cultural landscape and identity. Genoways praises the foresight of former LSU President James Monroe Smith, who first proposed both the press and the journal back in 1935:

“Today, James Monroe Smith looks like a genius for recognizing that great universities extend well beyond the edges of their campuses. They reach out to the larger world, they challenge and engage the public, and the most effective and enduring way of doing so remains the written word. How will history judge today’s university presidents if they fail to protect these legacies of publishing excellence their forebears have entrusted to their care?”

Sources: Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, Business Week

Image by jeffpearce, licensed under Creative Commons

A review of the new book of poems by Pulitzer-winning poet Rita Dove tells the story of a man who could have changed the history of classical music. Instead he disappeared. Here’s Teresa Witz reviewing the book for The Root:

Way, way back in the day, there was an Afro-Polish violinist, a biracial child prodigy of such virtuosity that even Beethoven felt compelled to dedicate a sonata to him. There were honors and accolades and patronage from a prince.

But fortunes changed, as poet laureate Rita Dove describes in her novel-sized book of poems, Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play. The violinist, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, and his composer, Ludwig van Beethoven,  performed the sonata together to thunderous acclaim.

The goodwill between them evaporated as the two quarreled over a woman. Beethoven furiously erased Bridgetower’s name and scribbled the name of another violinist when he dedicated the sonata.

That is how the “Sonata Mulattica” became the “Kreutzer Sonata,” one of Beethoven’s most famous works. Through that one fit of jealous retribution, Beethoven wrote Bridgetower out of history.

The Polish black virtuoso, once famous, now forgotten.

Thanks a lot, Ludwig.

Source:  The Root  

In 1962, Manhattan ad man Martin Speckter wanted a punctuation mark that would “express that hard-to-capture middle state between excitement and inquiry: incredulity.” He merged the question mark and exclamation point into one symbol, dubbing it the “interrobang,” a portmanteau of “interrogate” and “bang” (printers’ jargon for an exclamation point). The symbol never caught on, as most typewriter companies were hesitant to add a new key.

But technology has evolved, and the interrobang could finally have its day as the punctuation mark for the twenty-first century. “Spekter can even be said to be a pioneer, anticipating our present predilection for shorthand and abbreviation,” writes Paloma Friedman in Maisonnueve. “The very technology that allows for the interrobang’s wider dissemination—e-mail, text-messaging and online games—is also the ideal medium for it.”

Friedman champions the interrobang, noting its “capacity to pique interest and reinforce the effect of frenzied sentences” such as "She said what!?" or the ubiquitous "WTF!?"

Source: Maisonnueve

Thanks to the always profound Mexico City-based blog Toxico for this lovely Henry Miller quote:

I give all I have to give, voluntarily, and take as much as I can possibly ingest. I am a prince and a pirate at the same time. I find that there is plenty of room in the world for everybody–great interspatial depths, great ego universes, great islands of repair, for whoever attains to individuality. On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface.

Toxico is much more than a blog—it’s a Mexico City-based cultural project that organizes lectures, classes, and exhibitions. “Creativity is not a luxury,” one member writes on the organization's website. “It is indispensable.”

Source: Toxico 

Reading Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World (Viking) is a great way to wrap your head around many of the technical, geographical, and ethical issues surrounding nuclear power and nuclear weapons. By learning exactly how we came to turn an odd yellow rock into an agent of phenomenal promise and danger, you’ll be better informed to decide the wisdom of reviving nuclear power and letting nuclear weapons proliferate.

One of the book’s most memorable sections is about William L. Laurence, the public relations man who hyped the atomic bomb for the U.S. government. Laurence was a science writer for the New York Times who became so enthralled by nuclear weapons that he became their paid P.R. man while covering the science beat, a brazen conflict of interest that was kept secret until the day after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Zoellner chronicles Laurence’s almost spiritual conversion to the religion of the atom and unsparingly critiques his writing style, which was so over the top that the White House once sent back a press release draft for being too exaggerated:

Laurence never met a classical allusion that he didn’t like, or attempt to employ. ... Uranium was to Laurence, at various points, ‘a cosmic treasure house’ and a ‘philosopher’s stone’ or a ‘Goose that laid Golden Eggs,’ which ‘brought a new kind of fire that lead to ‘the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola.’ These messianic word-pictures of a life to come, though wildly overoptimistic , helped to create in the American public a generally positive and hopeful feeling about the dawn of the new atomic age.

Laurence, known as “Atomic Bill” to some, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Times series about the making of the atomic bomb—a prize that journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman have said should be rescinded. Not only was Laurence on the War Department’s payroll, they contend; he also wrote stories that debunked the deadly effects of gamma ray radiation even as Japanese bomb victims lay dying.

Fairly, Zoellner notes that Laurence himself had misgivings about the “great forebodings” of the nuclear age, and once characterized the human race’s dilemma in his typically dramatic style: “Today we are standing at a major crossroads,” he wrote. “One fork of the road has a signpost inscribed with the word Paradise, the other fork has a signpost bearing the word Doomsday.”

It might have been as close to the truth as he ever got.

Sources: Viking/Penguin, Common Dreams 

Writing a story in the 140 characters allowed by Twitter is nearly impossible, but Dan Baum has managed to do it. Baum chronicled his rise and fall as a staff writer for the New Yorker in bursts of fewer than 140 characters. Reading his page in chronological order from the bottom up, with all the unnatural line breaks, can be disorienting. But the story has wit, a plot, and plenty of windows into one of the most sought after jobs in writing.

Here are four Tweets that provide a good example of his Twitter narrative (Twarrative?):

“I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn’t work there. I live in Colorado. But I’d visit 3-4X a year.”

“Everybody whispers.”

“It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.”

“Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.”

(Thanks, Bloggasm.)

Source: Dan Baum’s Twitter Page

Writers overuse the em-dash—that all too convenient of punctuation marks. By employing the em-dash too often—whether out of laziness or a lack of creativity—they neglect the simple pleasures of the semicolon. Lionel Shriver writes for Standpoint:

These days, the semicolon exudes an aura of the fusty, the fastidious, and the defunct; of mildewed stacks, tight hair buns, and prissily sharpened pencils; of hesitancy, diffidence, and uncertainty, in contrast to the em-dash, which exudes a spirit of strength, flair, and decisiveness.

There is little left to say about Studs Terkel's classic oral history of working America. In fact, there is little left to do with Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do—it's already been a radio drama and a broadway musical. Now, thanks to comic-book author Harvey Pekar, Brown University's Paul Buhle, and 18 graphic storytellers, it's a graphic novel.

We'll let the work speak for itself. Enjoy.

Images courtesy of The New Press. 

I had a dream that I was back in the house I used to share with 11 other college students in Washington, D.C., and apparently I was also Barack Obama's girlfriend. He was one of my roommates and also the President of the United States. There was a huge, Dr. Seuss-like pile of dirty dishes in the sink. It was my turn to wash them, and I hadn't done my duty. President Obama was on television in the living room, giving a speech. All my roommates were eyeing me with anger and contempt, crossing their arms and saying things like, "You think you're so special? Just 'cause you're the President’s girlfriend doesn't mean you don't have to pitch in and do your chores." In spite of their judgment, I felt comforted and safe, like no matter what happened, Obama would be home soon and make everything okay.

I had this dream before I heard about Sheila Heti’s Obama dream-collecting project through Utne’s Shelf Life and Great Writing blog. Now I feel like I’m part of some larger collective consciousness.  

Image by springhill 2008, licensed under Creative Commons

Sources: Utne Daily, Geist, I Dream of Barack

Changing language is no cause for concern for many linguists and lexicographers, Ben Yagoda writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Contrary to popular belief, expert wordies are interested in “charting and interpreting recent and historical changes in the way English is written and spoken, not interested in labeling those changes as ‘mistakes,’ and even less interested in decrying such so-called errors as evidence of a decline in American civilization.” Yagoda recalls a panel discussion on language whose audience was distraught by the use of “impact” as a verb and “their” as a singular pronoun, but the experts didn't seem too bothered.

The audience should probably get used to it, as such changes are likely to continue. With native English speakers diminishing, the language will change to better reflect the lives of those who use the language. Annalee Newitz argued for Utne Reader's November-December issue that this linguistic evolution should be embraced, not derided.

Source: The Chronicle Review of Higher Education, Utne

In Australia dwells a nearly extinct creature called the boodie, an omnivorous and nocturnal burrowing animal “like a kangaroo no bigger than a modest teddy bear” with “a particular appetite for underground fungi,” writes Tim Winton in “Repatriation: Travels Through a Recovering Landscape” in the beefy environmental lit journal Ecotone (Vol. 4, No. 1&2; article not online). Traveling the desert lands of northwestern Australia in the boodie’s former range, Winton also traverses the puzzles and paradoxes of Australian conservation in this engaging and decription-rich essay. Naturally “leery of wealthy do-gooders,” he nonetheless comes to see promise in privately funded efforts to preserve prime boodie habitat. Part of the fun of the essay, I’ll admit, is the Australian animal names. Winton writes about one researcher, Alexander Baynes, who has

“produced a roll call of troubled species that includes not just the boodie and the woylie, but the elusive wambenger, the chuditch, the short-beaked echidna, and several species of dunnarts, bandicoots, bats, wallabies, and mice.

“Creatures with names like these would be at home in a satire by Jonathan Swift, so it should be no surprise to discover that … coordinates put Gulliver hereabouts. At the time Swift was writing, there was indeed an austral island teeming with creatures more strange and marvelous than even he could imagine, but so quickly have they disappeared from view or from existence altogether that they can sometimes seem a product of mere fancy.”

Winton's article was previously published as "Silent Country" in the Australian magazine The Monthly. Read it in full (pdf) on the website of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

Sources: Ecotone, Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Shark Bay World Heritage Area 

Image courtesy of DEC / Babs and Bert Wells.

The Nigerian author Chris Abani has written a profoundly sharp and inspiring essay on writing and the human condition. If you care about either, read the piece in the "Dismissing Africa" issue of the annual journal Witness. Here's just a taste:

"This is what I know about being human—that we all desire to live without fear, or disease, or affliction, but that we all refuse to give up our crutches. James Baldwin said it better: 'I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.'

"In making my art, and sometimes when I teach, I am like a crazed, spirit-filled, snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, spell-casting, Babylon-chanting-down, new-age, evangelical preacher wildly kicking the crutches away from my characters, forcing them into their pain and potential transformation. Alas, or maybe not, I also kick the crutches away from my readers. And many have fled from the revival tents of my art, screaming in terror."

Source: Witness 

Obituaries have come a long way from the no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am death notices of old. People now view life as a never-ending story, Stefany Anne Golberg writes in the Smart Set, and modern obituaries reflect that literary shift. The obits are now more like tales condensed out of lives that are invariably messy, sprawling, and chaotic.

“An obituary, any obituary, transforms lives into stories, with interesting characters, a cohesive plot, and most importantly, a good ending. This is what we’ve got as humans—not the ability to understand or be at one with death, but the ability to generate lots of stupid crap to fill in the empty space of the unknown.”

Sources: The Smart Set

The term “hipster” has become a mark of derision. It’s mostly used in the context of “get out of my way, you damn hipsters,” or “that place is filled with stupid hipsters.” Writing on a personal blog A Fantasy of Flight, former 826 Valencia intern Zoe Ruiz explains why she’s not going to call people hipsters anymore:

At the point in time that I began to use the term hipsters I was very much dissatisfied with myself, with my life, and with anyone I met. I am not now dissatisfied with myself (most of the time). Hipster has become a word that carries a sense of dissatisfaction and a bit of anger. I have no use for a word that carries such a mood.

Better to leave the Hipster Olympics to other people:

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: A Fantasy of Flight 

Adolf Hitler loved to read. This may not surprise you. What he read, however, surely will. The shelves of Hitler’s private library were burdened with more than 16,000 books. Military history was well represented alongside nationalist and anti-Semitic literature. But there were romance novelettes too, which he is said to have covered with plain paper to obscure them. His popular fiction collection, hundreds strong, also included cowboy-and-Indian tales, British thrillers, and detective stories. There were studies of the Catholic Church and the paranormal. There were the works of philosophers and playwrights. Hitler was well—or at least widely—read, and that is troubling.

In an essay for the New York Review of Books, John Gross considers Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, a new book by Timothy W. Ryback, and searches for new light in Hitler’s library. Ultimately he fails, and you can hardly blame him. He explains:

“Life for historians would be a lot easier if the Nazi’s had been barbaric in every respect—if their only reaction to the word 'culture' had been to reach for their guns. Often, of course, they were worse than barbaric; but they also represented a hideous distortion of culture rather than just a flat turning away from it. And this is as true of Hitler as of any of his followers. Cruelty, resentment, and the lust for power weren’t the only things driving him. He needed to believe in himself as a thinker as well.”

Source: New York Review of Books 

Sheila Heti began collecting dreams about Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries. Even after Obama’s victory and his first 100 days Heti’s peculiar dream journal is an irresistibly peculiar read: 

Then he is in my bed wearing blue striped boxers. I have a perfect apartment in Harvard Square … The room has a bohemian look, all earth tones and Indian prints. The afternoon sun is coming through the window above the bed. I remember the intense conversation we shared … We’re talking less intensely now. I’m reclining on the side of the bed, not touching him … We fall silent and our eyes meet. Then we kiss very softly. I can feel his desire to relax, to be himself, to lose himself here. I realize this could never be kept a secret. I know how disastrous it would be for the man about to be our country’s first black president to have an affair with a white woman twenty years his junior. I cannot risk any chance of ­being the woman who will cost our country his presidency. I put my hand on his chest and say, This is getting ­really dangerous really fast.

The venerable Geist magazine has collected the best of these dreams and produced a video of dream readings over a montage of paintings they inspired.

Of course, if you’re more the Obama nightmare type, there is something for you too. Jamal, take it away.

Sources:  I Dream of Barack ,  Geist  

Image by EricaJoy. Licensed under Creative Commons. 

“I asked one Inuit woman how she felt about the land,” Jay Griffiths writes in the latest Orion. “ ‘I remember it was beautiful,’ she said wistfully. The land was still there, a few yards from her door, thousands of miles of land as wide and beautiful as it ever had been but she was weirdly—artificially—alienated from it.”

The woman isn’t alone in her experience: In “Artifice v. Pastoral,” Griffiths riffs on the peculiar alienation that infects modern life—a dangerous estrangement that we’ve wrapped ourselves into with layer upon layer of fakery, from unsustainable energy use to manufactured wealth. The problem, Griffiths writes, is that all this artifice disconnects us from the natural world, confuses us about what’s real, and alienates us from one another.

Only an excerpt of the exquisite essay is available on Orion’s website, but in its stead the venerable, spiritual, environmental magazine offers a gem: A recording of Griffiths reading her entire piece aloud. Lovely.

Source: Orion

In the current issue of Transition, Chinua Achebe talks to David Chioni Moore and Analee Heath about fifty years of his legendary novel Things Fall Apart. It’s a fascinating, lively interview (not available online), in large part because Chioni Moore and Heath bring 20 different editions of the novel to their interview with Achebe, so there’s a lot to talk about: a half-century of author photos, blurbs, introductions, and, often most interestingly, book covers—some lovely, some uninspiring, and some terribly problematic.

“I’m not sure I have ever influenced any cover of any of my books,” Achebe says. “Publishers have their own sense of what and how they want to sell. I come in not as a buyer, but as somebody else, and I would not want to have any violent quarrels with them.”

Moving through the editions chronologically—beginning with the first Heinemann edition, from 1958—Chioni Moore and Heath eventually bring out a pretty shocking 1976 edition that features, as Chioni Moore puts it, “a shirtless African man raging with a bloody knife in front of a burning cross.”

“You know,” Achebe says, “quite frankly I don’t know what to make of this.”

They also touch on the editions Achebe names as favorites—the Anchor Books 50th anniversary edition, pictured above, and the 1992 Everyman’s Library edition—and ask what he expects to see on the cover of Things Fall Apart at 100.

I think that where we’re headed is the final realization that Africans are people: nothing more, nothing less. In another fifty years, I hope we would have gotten there, and that references to the exotic or the primitive or the Other will have gone—and that whatever is happening in Africa will be handled just as something happening in Australia, America or elsewhere. Because, actually, we’ve come a long way in a short time.

Source: Transition 

If we had not already published our eight best cities for street food article, we’d have to seriously consider finding a way to include Malaysia’s meat bone tea.

In the Spring 2009 issue of Utne Independent Press Award nominee Meatpaper, Robyn Eckhardt traces the roots of this “seductive combination of tender pork meat, stomach and intestines, and fragrant broth that varies from mild and meaty to unmistakably medicinal.”

Meat bone tea, or bak kut, Eckhardt writes, “is comfort food of the first order, with an appetite-rousing aroma and luxurious amounts of fatty meat unfettered by vegetable distractions.”

For more from the current issue of Meatpaper, see Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti’s picks in the latest episode of Shelf Life.

For more Meatpaper, visit their website. Nothing from the current issue is online just yet, but there’s plenty to read and look at just the same.

Source: Meatpaper 

Mylisa Larsen is bewildered by her daughter Kate’s passion for fashion. Writing for Brain, Child, she wonders how “a woman whose idea of fashion is to exchange the five short-sleeved T-shirts she has been wearing all summer for five long-sleeved T-shirts in the fall” ends up with a four-year-old daughter who loves clothes with a “deep, unreasoning, helpless love.”

Larsen writes tenderly of her daughter’s relationship to clothes. “When we take her things out of the dryer, she puts each shirt up against her face before it goes in the basket, greeting it with endearments. She mourns the passing of a favorite sock for weeks, despairing until I want to tell her to get on with her life, date other socks.”

She worries that, as Kate gets older, her creative, joyful approach to fashion will become limiting and oppressive, that her penchant for pairing red butterfly tights with pink flowered capris will be lost to an addiction to trends. Uneasy about the world her daughter is so drawn to, Larsen decides that the best thing she can do as a parent is “to learn to play the game but to play it lightheartedly, with a sense of fun that gently signals that it’s only a game.”

To do so, she conducts an experiment: she adds some fashionable clothing to her wardrobe and wears it to church every other Sunday, trying to understand the appeal of fashion and observing how it affects her conversations and relationships.  

“This is how it happens sometimes,” Larsen concludes. “You will be following a child into a world that they will someday own…You go out of love, because they want to come here and you want to be with them…You will be stumbling along, trying to keep this child in sight, trying to be useful to them, and then something will happen. You fall in love with a skirt or a pair of shoes, and suddenly you understand that this is how your child feels all the time…Afterward, I feel unsure of myself, as if I should hold very still because there are things all around me that I can’t see.”

Source: Brain, Child

Slacking ought not be confused with idling, a far more noble activity, according to The Idler’s Glossary (Biblioasis, 2008), a pocket-sized volume that parses such distinctions with intellectual glee. Though constructed as a glossary it’s essentially a manifesto, shot through with author Joshua Glenn’s philosophical outlook on life and quotes from Eastern and Western sages from Krishna to Foucault. By peeling apart the language we use to describe our behavior—from the slothful to the sublime—and celebrating the “spontaneous, chilled, and untroubled” demeanor of the idler, The Idler’s Glossary gives us a great reason to sit down in an armchair with a big ol’ brandy snifter and call it research. Among our favorite definitions:

CAFÉ: Historically, one of the idler’s favorite haunts—a public space in which intelligent conversation, witty repartee, and revolutionary plotting were uniquely possible. Try doing any of the preceding in a Starbucks, though; the laptop- and cellphone-users will abhor you. Online communities aren’t as good, but they’re better than nothing. See: HANG.

DETACHMENT: Religiously speaking, detachment is not so much a form of aloofness or disengagement as it is a loving embrace of, and renewed fascination with, the world—but from a position of critical, even ironic distance. As Krishna counsels in the Bhagavad-Gita, we should renounce the fruits of our actions without renouncing action itself. See: ACEDIA, APATHETIC, INDIFFERENT, NONCHALANT, WAITING FOR GODOT.

SAUNTER: Thoreau, who wrote magnificently about the pleasures of walking aimlessly through nature, speculated that saunterers were, by virtue of their mode of ambulating, not going toward the Holy Land (Saint Terre); they were already in it. He wasn’t far wrong, etymologically. The term actually comes from the Middle English word for “walking about musingly”; it is derived from the word “saint,” as holy men were thought to spend much of their time in this manner. See: BUM, DRIFTER, FLANEUR, LOAF, SCAMP.

TIRED: The supine idler seeks inspiration in that state of consciousness that arises between sleep and waking. The drowsy, languid slacker, however, is merely giving in to the annihilating force of torpor. See: LANGUID, LASSITUDE, RECUMBENT, RELAX, TORPID.

If terms like “robotics” and “genetic engineering” seem too good to have been made up by scientists, it’s because they weren’t. Isaac Asimov invented the word “robotics” and the adjective “robotic” in his science fiction story Liar! and Jack Williamson coined the term “genetic engineering” in his novel Dragon's Island. The Oxford University Press blog compiled these and seven other scientific terms that actually came from science fiction, including “zero-gravity” and computer “virus.”

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

Politicians and immigration officials have tried to keep Mexico separate from the United States, but as Stephen Henighan writes for Geist, “the border inspires the creative evolution of forms of life that could not exist either in a purely American or a purely Mexican context.” Henighan’s examination of the California-Mexico border reveals a separation of the rich and the poor, rather than of Mexico and the United States. He concludes: 

Along this selective frontier, two cultures are merging in a way that consolidates the social stratification common to both. Cultures may blend as globalization proceeds, but the poor and the rich will continue to make separate crossings.

Source: Geist 

“Word has just reached us here in Tuscaloosa, that in Halberstadt, Germany, almost two years ago now, two pipes have been removed from the Blokwerk organ in St. Burchardi Church, silencing a pair of E’s that had been contributing to a chord playing continuously for the previous year and a half,” writes Michael Martone in The Oxford American. The chord he mentions is part of a 639-year performance of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible, a concert that began on September 5, 2001.

“I am fond of this admittedly highly conceptual piece,” he reflects. “I admire its hopeful nature, its assumption that someone not only will be around to play the final notes of the coda but that someone will be around to hear the silence that follows. The movements last seventy-one years each, lifetimes. There will be others present, as time goes on, to sound and sustain the decades-long chords, to harmonize with the apparently endless tonic, to engage the score for scores and scores of years.”

The concert serves as a jumping off point for a poignant musing on trains, time, sound, change and sadness. “Listen, I live near trains. And their timely and timeless concerts seem to be a kind of folk version, an unselfconscious rendition of the avant-garde tooting going on in Germany.

“How strange to have this music always there…Disembodied and massive, a moving wall, a kind of static, yet with distant, distinct eruptions of a phrase, a fragment that first asserts then loses its train of thought. Transmitted through invisible air, the hidden source is most often on the move, restless, remote, receding, leaving this polyphonic note floating in a wake… It is the perfect accompaniment…seamlessly incorporated into our emotional wiring, our ambient ache.”

Source: The Oxford American

Working as a writer in the 21st century is a labor of love, even for those lucky enough to have a steady paycheck. Writing is a tough business and isn’t as romantic as the clove-smoking, pill-popping, whiskey-chasing, “barely functional” lives that authors supposedly once led. Think Hunter S. Thompson, Dylan Thomas, or preeminent “boozy fistfight[er]” John Keats. Is that mystique gone, or are successful writers getting to be both hard-working and boring?

Writing for Poets & Writers (print only), Amy Shearn searches for the "badly behaved writers" in MFA workshops but instead finds a "revenge of the nerds" movement. She writes:

My classmates were more egghead than cokehead. At our parties we played dominoes, complained about the school’s administration, and went home early so we could get up the next day and write. After a while it became clear that the writers who were going to make it—the ones who were getting the grants and publications and cushy fellowships—were those who buckled down and worked hard, the nerds in the wrist braces who filled out paperwork with the diligence of accountants. As for me, I forced myself to stay on a prudent schedule and wrote a few hours every day before heading to my day job. It wasn’t sexy, but it worked. My first novel was published last summer.

In the same article professor, essayist, and novelist Charles Baxter, puts it another way:

When an artist is no longer envied, when hopes are no longer invested in her or him, the aura fades, as does the glamour. Rock stars still have the aura; they are gods, and gods drink and get drugged-up and go wild and have sex with everybody and die young. Writers are no longer gods; everybody knows that.

Source: Poets & Writers

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is publisher and playwright David LaBounty of Blue Cubicle Press . We asked him for five links. Here's what happened:

With two kids and one computer, I’m lucky if I’m allowed time to update my own sites. Here is one site I visit every day, and four others I wish I could frequent more often.  

The Morning Post: Every morning for almost two years, rain, snow, or moonlight, I donned my paperboy bag and delivered The Washington Post to Suburbia. I hated it: early mornings, loud dogs, scary garden gnomes, newsprint-covered hands, and falling asleep in English class. Sundays, when I could only carry four papers at a time, I would think to myself: “There has got to be a better way to do this.” However, a bond grew between the paper and me. After I finished my route, I would sit at the kitchen table and read the comics (three pages!) while I ate my bowl of cereal. No matter where I’ve lived, I’d try to find a copy to read – it’s as close to a hometown paper as I ever had. Twenty years later, I still start every morning with a bowl of cereal and The Post – online. I feel a little guilty for contributing to print’s demise, but I’m sure it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to deliver.

Atomic Baltimore: I love every bookstore that carries our journals, but only one has a blog I follow: Atomic Books in Baltimore. If I didn’t think print was dead, I’d start my own bookstore, and I’d model it after Atomic.

Meet Fwis: Will you be able to judge an electronic book by its cover? Thankfully, we have a few months to worry about that. (Album art is already dead – no more hours ‘studying’ Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.) For now, we can judge real book covers courtesy of the gang at Fwis. The discussions are usually as interesting as the covers.

Teen Zine Clubs and More: For the moment, print is still alive – in Montana. Slumgullion is a “publishing collaboration project that strives to create community, empower young voices, and promote literacy and the humanities through the book arts and zines.” They run a Teen Zine Club and a bicycle-powered bookmobile. If they had been around when I lived there, I never would have left. 

Get Published: We started The First Line because there were few publications available for new writers. Now, thanks to the interwebs, there is no shortage of magazines willing to read your prose or poetry. (Good or bad? Discuss.) Duotrope is a wonderful, simple site that filters out the noise and allows you to find publications (even print ones) for your masterpieces.  

BIO: David LaBounty is an editor by day and a playwright by night. His plays have appeared on stages both large and small, and with his wife, Robin, he runs Blue Cubicle Press, home of the literary magazines The First Line, Workers Write!, and Overtime.

An activity as solitary as reading a work of fiction may actually help us become better at connecting with others, writes psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley in Greater Good.

Oatley says fiction is about “possible selves in possible worlds,” and can aid interpersonal skills in two ways: by helping readers develop “theory of mind”—imagining what others are thinking and feeling—as well as showing how people interact with one another.

Readers of fiction were found to have higher social ability than those who preferred non-fiction. The reason?

“Fiction is principally about the difficulties of selves navigating the social world. Non-fiction is about, well, whatever it is about: selfish genes, or how to make Mediterranean food, or whether climate changes will harm our planet. So with fiction we tend to become more expert at empathizing and socializing. By contrast, readers of non-fiction are likely to become more expert at genetics, or cookery, or environmental studies, or whatever they spend their time reading and thinking about.”

Source: Greater Good Magazine

In a delightfully “gigantic, sloppy fan letter,” The Stranger’s books editor Paul Constant recalls his first encounter (and subsequent infatuation) with the novelist James Morrow. His charming opus is a must-read, I’d say, for anyone who’s ever had a love-at-first-chapter, life-changing stumble into an author. As Constant tells it:

When I was 10, I’d read all the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books and everything by Terry Pratchett. A friend recommended Kurt Vonnegut, and I cut a swath through his entire body of work like only an awkward adolescent could. I needed something new, and I browsed the science-fiction section, where I picked up a $4.50 Ace paperback with a hideous, faux-marble cover called Only Begotten Daughter, by James Morrow.

I don't remember what, exactly, drew me to pick it up, but I can tell you why I bought it with my gift certificate. The blurbs sold me—two compared Morrow to Vonnegut—and I liked the premise, cheesily described in the back-cover text:

It could only happen in New Jersey. Call it a miracle. Call it the Second Coming. Call it a mishap at the sperm bank. But somehow, a baby daughter was born to the virgin Murray Katz, and her name is Julie. She can heal the blind, raise the dead, and generate lots of publicity. In fact, the poor girl needs a break, even if it means a vacation in Hell (which is unseasonably warm). So what did you expect? It ain't easy being the Daughter of God... 

To someone raised Catholic who never had a devout moment in his short life, this was quite possibly the Most Appealing Book in the World.

Source: The Stranger

The lurid and hyperbolic headlines of tabloid newspapers expose a seedy underbelly of human crime and voyeurism. For Shannon Stewart, that’s an inspiriation for poetry. “Sensationalistic news, as an often coarse and unrefined commodity, caters to our darkest fears and need,” Stewart told Maisonneuve. Penny Dreadful, Stewart’s new book of poetry, draws off these fears to create often funny poems that play with themes and headlines from tabloids like the Weekly World News. Rather than disengage from the horrific news, Stewart used her poetry to engage with it through humor. "For me," said Stewart, "the tabloid poems worked as a kind of painkiller." You can watch a video of Stewart reading two of her tabloid poems below:

“In decaying societies, politics become theater,” begins Chris Hedges’ lucid, scathing critique of American culture in the era of corporate bailouts. His Truthdig column, “America is in Need of a Moral Bailout,” argues that our society’s moral collapse is just as horrific as our economic one. 

Hedges starts by decrying the hypocrisy of the ruling elite, who feed into the political theater while clinging to their power at all costs.      

“The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation,” he writes. “They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled.”

Hedges then traces our “moral nihilism” to the decline of both education and mainstream media: “We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding...Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself.”

He goes on to quote from Theodor Adorno’s essay “Education After Auschwitz”, which states that in order to prevent atrocities like the Holocaust from happening, “education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.”  But this is not the case in our current system, which increasingly quashes critical discourse and steers students into business careers.

The result is a “timid, cowed and confused population”, which champions “a childish hyper-masculinity” over the complexities of moral choice, as evidenced in everything from the rise of reality television (think Survivor) to our indifference to torture and war. 

Source: Truthdig

Image by f-l-e-x, licensed under Creative Commons

Modern furniture is having an identity crisis. A couch can no longer be content as a simple couch, now it must be able to convert into a bed, or a desk, or a stove (yes, a stove).  The houseware-gadgetry isn’t always as functional as it may seem, and much of it never gets past the prototype stage, but Greg Beato writes for the Smart Set that the dual functions imbue our lives with a “luster of utility.”

The motivation behind the overly complicated stuff goes beyond saving money and saving space. Beato writes:

We are on a spiritual quest to attain higher and higher levels of seamless efficiency and fruitless productivity, and our iPhones can’t shoulder the burden of our dreams entirely by themselves, can they?  We need furniture that is as promiscuously versatile as Swiss Army knives — chairs that are 300 percent more chair-like than normal chairs, coffee tables that blossom into dining tables, stoves you can sit on without setting your ass on fire.

Source: The Smart Set 

“Ask any Russian about mushrooming and you’ll hear their salivary glands activate, their voices gather breath as they expound on the beauty of the forest and the quiet thrill of the hunt in something akin to beat poetry," Julia Ioffe writes in Russia!'s Fall/Winter 2009 issue. 

Ioffe’s essay offers a simple yet elegant snapshot of this enduring Russian custom, which she learned as child growing up outside Moscow. Ioffe narrates both the history of mushrooming and her introduction to its practice, illuminating an aspect of Russian life seldom seen by most Americans. Since “Shrooming” is not available online, here are some excerpts:

“It was a matter of great importance that I learn to forage for my own protein and so, almost as soon as I could walk, I was initiated into the cult of the mushroom.”

“Remarkably, respect for mushrooms in Russia is such that it transcends Russian disrespect for the environment. In a country where oil was left to pool on the ground and the Aral Sea was reduced to a salt plain, mushrooms were lovingly sliced down, not ripped out of the earth, to ensure future crops.”

She then explains the multitude of fungal varieties in loving detail, as “most Russians also moonlight as mycologists”, careful to delineate the edible from the poisonous by color and texture. 

“One must know... that rotting birch is prime real estate for colonies of pale opyata (honey fungus) stacked atop one other like favela dwellings, though you should wait for autumn to gather them in earnest”

It all makes for highly engaging reading, emblematic of this unique new independent magazine, which devotes itself solely to Russian-related topics.

Source: Russia!

The Winter 2009 issue of Small Farmer’s Journal arrived in our library today. The beautiful, large-format quarterly delivers unswervingly rich content (from incisive essays to equipment reviews), but in this issue one thing stood out: the results of the Young Farmer’s Writing Contest. “We had scads (that means lots) of outstanding entries and our three judges had a great time sorting through them all,” writes SFJ editor and publisher Lynn Miller. “You give this old word-butcher pause to think perhaps the future for the written agrarian word is alive and well.”

SFJ had more submissions than its editors could publish in the Winter 2009 issue, so there will be more young writing in forthcoming editions of the journal. Since it's not available online, here's a sampling of the fun:

“Have ever known anyone who just, well… runs with the wrong pack? My family has one of those, but she’s a sheep named Eloise, Ella for short. She loves our three dogs; literally, she thinks they’re her family. I see you’re a bit confused so I’ll explain…”—“Ella NOT So Enchanted,” by Rachael Stahl, age 11

“In the morning, I go check on our chickens. Sometimes, I scare a bunny off our lawn. I watch it hop into the bushes. When I reach the chicken house, I look to see if they need feed or water. If they need feed, I fill the feeder. When they need water, I take the water can to the hydrant. Then I come back—slosh, slosh, slosh. Now the water is clean and full. When chores are done, back to my house, I go.”—“Feeding the Chickens,” by Hannah Smith, age 8

“I also want to tell you about names. We name every cat. . . . Perhaps the funniest name is Itsy-Bitsy-Bottle of Onion Salts. More unusual names are Chocolate-Chip-Ice-Cream, Pufferbelly, and Scrub-a-Dub-Dub. Names that have been used very excessively are Mittens and Cottontail and such.”—“Cat Tails,” by Peter Strahm, age 13

“I stood at the head of the wagon, heading home, watching the harnessed backs of my horses rise and fall in a gentle trot. Behind me on the wagon rose a sea of waving tails. Before me was enjoyment, trouble, and pain, the life of a farmer. But who wanted to be a lawyer? Or an accountant? Or a politician? Of course this is a matter of opinion, but in my opinion, farming was summer up in one word: good.”—“The Perfect Morning,” by Rita May Kawecki, age 13

Source: Small Farmer's Journal 

Image by gregor_y, licensed under Creative Commons.

“The dollar isn’t the basic economic unit. It’s sunlight. It’s all sunlight: we’re made of sunlight: every dollar paid across for steak and broccoli, and every mile traveled in an SUV, is translatable from calories of incident solar radiation on the planet, origin of wealth, origin of economic goods, stored as petroleum, stored as sugar.”

—Louis B. Jones, “Table Talk,” from the Threepenny Review

“If we can ban visitors as threats to public safety, could we not also ban books as dangers to public sanity? . . . Might we not indeed go further and implement a general prohibition on bloggers writing books?”

—Stephen Howe, “Blog Standard,” from New Humanist (not yet available online)

“Some might wonder why one should bother to save Catholic institutions. Perhaps the time has come to abandon bricks-and-mortar Catholicism and live the faith by blending like yeast into the secular society.”

—Daniel P. Sulmasy, “Then There Was One: The unraveling of Catholic health care,” from America

“Call yourself color-blind if you like, but it’s mighty white of you.”

—Roy Blount, Jr., “Preposterous Lengths,” from Oxford American (not yet available online)

Sources: Threepenny Review, New Humanist, America, Oxford American

Image by pam calvert, licensed under Creative Commons.

Did you know that the ruby slippers are missing?

Did you know that there are at least four pairs of ruby slippers walking this earth? (Only one set is missing.)

Whether or not you’re a Wizard of Oz fan—and, ahem, whether or not you ever ruined a perfectly good pair of your mother’s pumps with glue, red puff paint, and a motley assortment of sequins and rhinestones—“Who Stole the Ruby Slippers?” is a fascinating, page-turning look at a still-unsolved mystery with a lot of strange players involved. (Munchkins! Museum directors! Small-town cops! Mickey Rooney, sort of!)

Tim Gihring, who wrote the rollicking piece for the March issue of Minnesota Monthly, follows the cult of the ruby slippers into some surprising places, starting with the unlikeliest of all: a jumbled pile of shoes inside a “rotting, rat-infested warehouse” at MGM, where they sat until 1970, some 30 years after the film’s release. He describes an early encounter with the missing slippers, which were stolen from a Grand Rapids, Minnesota, museum in 2005:

I decided they were the kind of shoes no woman would wear who didn’t need them to leave a land of kindly midgets. They were both gaudier and plainer than I expected, rather squat and completely covered in sequins, like Elvis in his later years. Only the marvel of Technicolor made them dazzle. Without the devotion of their fans, they would fetch no more than $20 at a thrift store.

Source: Minnesota Monthly

"In September 2003, the descendants of John Marshall, the fourth and arguably greatest Chief Justice of the United States, gathered at the Richmond Marriott for a weekend of cocktails and lectures." So begins the most laugh-out-loud funny piece of writing I've stumbled across in a literary journal since... It's damn funny is my point. Peyton Marshall, a descendent of no fewer than three of John Marshall's six children ("Kissing cousins," explains the author's father). I want you to read this, but I don't want to spoil it trying to sell it to you. I'll just say this: the things that shouldn't be funny are: the wax bust of John Marshall, the fawning historians, the flashbacks to the author's short career selling double-wides on the Iowa prarie. And if you don't know A Public Space, the fine people who published this fine piece, you ought to.

Source: A Public Space 

When I come across new writers on the internet, I almost instinctively Google their names. If I’m really motivated, I’ll check Facebook to see if they’ve got a photo. Call me superficial, but I like to put a face to the writing.

That face can also distract readers and critics from what’s really important—the writing. On Virginia Quarterly Review's blog, Jacob Silverman explores the “hot-or-not syndrome” that’s infected publishing, pointing to the a heated discussion over novelist Marisha Pessl's come-hither book-jacket photo (seen left). The website Gawker, for example, called her, “book hot,” “TV hot,” “college admissions brochure hot,” and “Eliminated first episode of Top Model Cycle hot.”

Minimal space in that coverage was devoted to Pessl’s abilities as a writer, even though her novel was generally well received. Since “no one publishes a book of literary fiction because of how its author looks in a single photograph,” according to Silverman, most of this superficial coverage amounts to a distraction provided by lazy critics.

Outside the realm of literary fiction, where personalities like Julia Allison can get famous for being good looking and great self promoters, the problem could be a bit more serious.

(Thanks, the Millions.)

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

The latest issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (LCRW) fairly buzzes with vibrant, intelligent writing.  This literary ‘zine published biannually out of Northampton, Massachusetts has been around for a decade or so and features a lively blend of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics.   

Nick Wolven’s story “The Lovesling” follows the path of a “dramatic new tool for mega love increasement” and unfolds with disarming grace and humor, as the titular instrument takes on a surprising life of its own.  Kat Meads’ “The Emily(s) Debate the Impact of Reclusivity on Life, Art, Family, Community, and Pets” situates the two great Emilys of literature, Dickinson and Brontë, in an insufferable public dialogue with their fans, calling attention to, among other things, the cult of celebrity around authors.  And Kim Parko’s prose poems work like odd little parables.  “Shiny Hair”, for example, tells the story of two girls whose existence is defined by their hair: “One was always treated better than the other because of her thick, shiny hair, but that is not to say she was treated well.” It's an introduction that evolves into a unsettling yet totally engrossing poem .

LCRW is only available through direct order, so check out their website, which also contains information on their press, Small Beer Press.

“We all know that ‘good marriages take work.’ There it is again, work: the cornerstone of our society. Wage labour, relationship labour—are you ever not on the clock?”

—The CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, “Adultery and Other Half Revolutions,” from Briarpatch

“[W]e all have the freedom to choose the identity that most reflects our aspirations. I’ve let go of the tropes of the moment, ways others define my identity—blackness, femaleness, bisexuality, Americanness, able-bodiedness. I work to cultivate an identity that is more nuanced, more intuitive than these blanket terms.”

—Rebecca Walker, interviewed by Joy Gugeler, from Room (not available online)

“The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A–.”

William Deresiewicz, “The Hypothesis,” from Lapham’s Quarterly (not available online)

“Instead of having sand made out of coral and lava rocks and other rocks and shells, now we are having beaches made out of broken-down plastics.”

—Captain Charles Moore, interviewed by Nell Greenberg, from Earth Island Journal

Sources: Briarpatch, Room, Lapham’s Quarterly, Earth Island Journal

Image by Ljubisa Bojic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Poet Todd Boss is on a roll.  His debut book Yellowrocket has garnered the kind of attention most poets only dream about, including rave reviews in the Christian Science Monitor and Charleston Post Courier and praise from writers like Sherman Alexie and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jack Miles.  Boss also recently won the Emily Clark Balch Prize in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which named Yellowrocket one of the ten best poetry books of the year.  But, just as impressive is his vision for poetry, which extends beyond the printed page to include innovative collaborations with artists from a variety of mediums, including photographers, musicians, and even animators.  Through this work Boss is challenging the boundaries of contemporary verse and welcoming a range of voices into his artistic dialogue.  It just might be the future of poetry. 

Read the Utne Reader profile of the poet: A Generous New Voice in American Poetry.

You can also listen to these sample tracks of poetry by Todd Boss:

How it Must Have Been for Him

The World Does Not Belong to You, Though You Belong to the World,

The Deeper the Dictionary

“My retirement plan is to be found stiff and cold at my writing desk.”

—Sandra Steingraber, “Sounds Like a Lot to Me,” from Orion

“Avoid internalizing society’s sexism, racism, ageism—pick an ism, any ism. See things from others’ points of view. Watch less TV. Sing and dance more.”

—Paul Krassner (interviewed by David Kupfer), “In the Jester’s Court,” from the Sun

“Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?”

—John Derbyshire, “How Radio Wrecks the Right,” from the American Conservative 

“…We face the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Shit is real.”

—Andre Torres, editor’s note, from Wax Poetics (not available online)

  Sources: Orion, The American Conservative, The Sun, Wax Poetics

For years, studies have shown that people can derive significant health benefits from writing about their thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes each day. In today’s overly scheduled world, researchers from the University of Missouri tried to figure out what’s the minimum time commitment that people need to benefit from writing (pdf). They found that people were healthier after just two minutes of writing for two days, a total of just four minutes.

(Thanks, Very Short List.)

On a vacation many years ago, I misplaced my copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s classic novel Of Human Bondage inside an airport. As an airport employee asked my fellow passengers to whom the book belonged, both he and the crowd snickered as he read the title over the loudspeaker. I sheepishly reclaimed my book, embarrassed at the formative role the story had played in my maturation as a reader, all because of an anachronism in the title.

I’m glad I did retrieve the book, especially after reading Lydia Kiesling's recent review on the literary blog The Millions. Kiesling calls the Maugham’s masterpiece, “a healing salve for life's pernicious rash. It is a special shoe for the clubfoot of my mind.” The post is the latest in a series reviewing the books from the Modern Library’s 100 Best novels of the twentieth century.

“Like Cheez Whiz and the atom bomb, modern think tanks are a distinctly U.S. invention that has spread all over the world.”

—Jeff Gailus, “Mind Games,” from Alberta Views (not available online)

“The country’s run itself down, drinking too many subprime-mortgage martinis and smoking too many credit-default-swap cigarettes; having ignored clear signs its lifestyle was out of control, the nation’s caught a raging, recessionary cold that just might turn into the dangerous flu-monia of economic depression.”

—John Mecklin, “Work Out Plan,” from Miller-McCune

“Every morning, I throw on one of my many pairs of faded jeans, a shirt bearing the image of a radical band or en electric guitar, and a Superman watch with silver bullets on the wristband. . . . The fact that I’m almost three bucks over 30 and a long-married mother of two kids makes my fashion sense all the more creepy.”

—Hope Gatto, “Rocker Mama,” from Mothering (not available online)

“This would have been a big year for Darwin, if he had been fit enough to survive this long.”

—Grant Bartley, “God or Nature?” from Philosophy Now

Sources: Alberta Views, Miller-McCune, Mothering, Philosophy Now

Image by Pixel Drip, licensed under Creative Commons.

If you’ve ever picked up The Sun, you’ve encountered their exceptional “Readers Write” section. Each issue readers write in on a theme. This time it’s the dinner table. There’s abuse at the table. There’s a roaming table and a death row table. And there are a few examples of the dinner-table-as-palimpsest—like reader L. Zuckerman’s portrait of a table her father made years ago, now marked with “crisscrossing lines from many knives and pizza cutters” and “wax from last year’s Hanukkah candles.”

Typical of The Sun’s most consistently brilliant feature, it’s a heavy read and one you can’t put down. Want more? We’ve leaned on the magazine’s readers a few times, recently for a piece called The Purloined Library and another called Want to see the world? Start by staying home.

Source: The Sun 

Is poetry still relevant?  You be the judge.  For a sampling of thoughts on the current state of poetry by poets, check out this month’s Poetry, which contains eight manifestos to commemorate the centennial of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.  The following are quotes from D.A. Powell’s manifesto “Annie Get Your Gun”:

“I don’t know that artists and poets join schools for quite the same reason that sardines do. Sometimes there’s a true innovator in the bunch, sometimes they really do share some common misunderstandings about aesthetics, sometimes it just so happens that a bunch of really interesting people all shop at the same hat shop and they start to hang out and resemble one another and make little sandwiches. It can seem quite seductive to be associated with a school.”

“I think sometimes that artists, like other lower forms of intelligence, want to “belong.” Or rather, that they want to not belong in some similar ways. They want to belong to the outside, and yet to be recognized by the inside.”

“Maybe it’s peculiar to our time, in which actual schools (academies) proliferate and spawn, that we’re seeing so much centrism. What we need is more eccentrism. Who isn’t tired of the contemporary qua contemporary? Who isn’t bored by innovation for innovation’s sake? It has, sadly, become the mode du jour. Not even a school.”

Source: Poetry

The March 2009 issue of Alberta Views arrived today, and what gem should I find in its pages but this: A two-for-one review of Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese’s latest books—a novel titled Ragged Company and a collection of essays called One Native Life—courtesy of AV’s longtime books columnist Alex Rettie.

Now, Alberta Views is one of my favorite magazines in the Utne Reader library. I’ve never even been to Alberta—and yet there’s something undeniably engrossing about the smart, political-cultural mélange that AV serves up. My favorite regular feature: Eye on Alberta, a department filled with “dispatches”—reprinted excerpts of articles, letters, speeches, advertisements, scholarly papers, and more—from across the province. When I read Eye on Alberta, I feel submerged in the politics and culture of another place, and I emerge with refreshed perspective on my own political fixations.

But this isn’t a post about Alberta Views: It’s a post about finding Richard Wagamese’s books reviewed in Alberta Views, and the great happiness that ensued—because Richard Wagamese equally holds down our affections here at Utne Reader. (And encountering the two of them together was not unlike like discovering two old friends of yours have known one another all along.)

We first had the honor of reprinting Richard Wagamese’s writing in our Sept.-Oct. 2007 issue, when we excerpted a column of his from Canadian Dimension about meeting his biological, Ojibway grandfather for the first time at age 25. In “Becoming Indian,” Wagamese writes:

I’d been taken away in the Sixties Sweep when the Canadian government hauled off Indian kids and dumped them into families far away from their traditional territories, and I hadn't seen my family for more than 20 years. I’d never known I had a grandfather, just as I’d never known I had a history or a culture vibrant, compelling, and alive. But both were there for me if I would have them.

Then, in our July-August 2008 issue, we couldn’t resist reprinting another column: “Moan Those Particular Blues,” about the music’s resonance with Native people, also from the very fine Canadian Dimension.

Richard is a heck of a writer, and I’m excited to know that his columns and essays are now collected in a book. As Alex Rettie writes in Alberta Views: “Wagamese walks his territory in One Native Life, and it’s an honour to walk with him.”

Image by  Ian Muttoo , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Alberta Views, Ragged Company, One Native Life, Canadian Dimension

Publishing books is easy, says writer Stona Fitch. Making them profitable is not. But Fitch had a solution to this common conundrum in mind when he started his own publishing house: Give books away for free.

It may sound crazy, but there’s an inspiring method to Fitch’s financial madness. “The idea was to produce beautiful, interesting new books and give them away,” Fitch told the Independent, “then ask people to give money to charity instead of paying for them.”

And so the Concord Free Press was born. They’ve published one book so far, Fitch’s novel, Give and Take, and according to their website, it’s generated $30,000 in charitable donations (many of which are individually listed on the site).

(Thanks, Book Ninja.)

Sources: The Independent, Concord Free Press, Book Ninja

“People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition.”

—David Galbraith, “Goodbye Dubai” from Smashing Telly 

“The greatest liberal of our time, I mean Barack Obama, is colluding in one of the worst sins against the liberal order in America, which is the slow death of the American newspaper.”

—Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist” from The New Republic 

“In a new place, everything from car horns to doorknobs is fascinating. The shape of public restroom urinals is something I always notice. Every place has urinals, but no place has urinals that look alike.”

—Tom Bissell, “An Interview with Tom Bissell” from Make (not available online)

“It pisses me off when I see people from South America, Australia, Florida, or the Middle East trying to pretend they’re Vikings. I respect Norse mythology—I’m a cosmopolitan person. But you also have a rich culture. Try to celebrate that.

—Ashmedi, “Rocking the Cradle of Civilization” from Bidoun (not available online)

Sources:  Smashing Telly ,  The New Republic ,  Make Magazine ,  Bidoun  

J.R. Carpenter has assembled a charming canine lexicon for the Winter issue of Geist. Carpenter’s “Words Dogs Know” are on the sophisticated side: phenomenology, conquest, corruption; they’re probably pretty representative of the average Geist-reading dog’s vocabulary. My favorite:

trust:  When they say: "We’ll be right back," they may not come right back, but they always do come back eventually. When they say: "It’s all right," it may not be all right yet, but it will be soon. When they say: "Stay," for no apparent reason, it’s best to just do it. Who knows, maybe there’s a car coming.

Source: Geist

Image by rgdaniel, licensed under Creative Commons. 

The annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) blew through Chicago this past weekend.  It’s impossible to sum up this four-day gathering, which includes hundreds of panels, readings, and parties, not to mention the sprawling bookfair of publishers, literary journals, and writing programs.  By conference end, you can spot an attendee by the dark circles under her eyes, which speak of too little sleep, too much caffeine, an overly stimulated intellect, and if she’s lucky, an event or two that blew her mind. 

Some highlights:

1) A literary rock & roll concert that re-imagined what a reading could be, sponsored by Columbia College Chicago and featuring authors ZZ Packer, Dorothy Allison, and Joe Meno, as well as the “circus punk” marching band, Mucca Puzza.  

2) A moving tribute to poet Jane Cooper by friends and colleagues, featuring Kazim Ali, Marie Howe, and Tony Hoagland.  Cooper was the State Poet of New York in 1995 and taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where she inspired future poets for decades.  The panelists converted me to this under-appreciated writer whose work is defined by a fierce attention and lyric grace.

3) A reading from the new anthology American Hybrid, which erases delineations between traditional lyric and experimental poetry.  What emerge are exciting new hybrids that invite readers in while attending to the possibilities of language.  Poets Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, and Ralph Angel were among those who lit up the crowd and helped American Hybrid sell out at the bookfair on the first day. 

But one person can only witness so much.  Thus, here's what other attendees thought of AWP:

"Remember, too, the story of novelist Pierre Jourde, author of Pays Perdu. A year or so after his novel reached the shelves of French bookstores, he returned on holiday to the tiny rural hamlet where his family had lived for generations. His novel was a comic account of life in that very village, and though he fictionalized his account, the inhabitants were nonetheless insulted. According to court records, six or seven of his former neighbors began kicking Jourde, pelting his car with 'stones the size of sugar,' and insulting his wife and three children. Jorde has filed charges of attempted murder."

—Dinty W. Moore, "Forty-Four Reasons Why You Absolutely, Positively Should Never Write That Book" from The Normal School (Issue #1)

“I write sonnets and I embalm, and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two.”

—Thomas Lynch to Mandy Iverson, “A Conversation with Thomas Lynch,” from Willow Springs (#63

“Don’t worry hon. When I come back I’ll take you with me. I am the bride of both Jesus Christ and Charles Manson. When all of it’s over we’ll rule the world. There’ll be peace and harmony and everybody can be married to as many people as they want and the only music will be rock and roll.”

—C.T. Lawrence, “Wish You Were Here,” from Event (V.37 #3)

Simply put, there’s an outstanding interview with Thomas Lynch in the new issue of Willow Springs. Lynch is a poet and an essayist—with half a dozen books of poetry and nonfiction writing to his credit. He’s also a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. “I write sonnets and I embalm,” he told Willow Springs, “and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two.”

As it turns out, the space in between poetry and embalming is expansive, studded with crackling-fresh observations and gloriously shrewd remarks. I urge you to take a spin through the entire interview. Here’s a little taste of what’s to come:

On everyday life: I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality. All they’re wondering about is how they’re going to die and who they’re going to sleep with, or variations on that theme. . . .

On Roe v. Wade: Twenty-five years after Roe v. Wade we’re still carping about it—thirty years now. You have to say it’s not a great law if we’re still carping about it. Settle law when it’s settled, you know. Whatever the outcome, the way they got there was not right. Didn’t work. Hasn’t worked.

On faith: I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago at a synagogue, called, “The Same but Different.” . . . There were hospice people and social workers and clergy, and I was to give the keynote speech about funeral customs and bereavement and how we respond to death—that type of thing. The lunchtime panel was a rabbi, a priest, a pastor, and an imam. And one of the questions from the audience was, “Does religion ever get in the way of people?”

They all gave predictable answers until the imam said, “There is no trouble with Islam. Muslims, however, are troublesome.”

And I thought, Isn’t it just so? I haven’t any trouble with Catholicism or Christianity, but Catholics, myself included—and particularly the reverend clergy—can really put me through spasms of doubt and wonder. And here’s the difference: I have come to think of them as articles of faith, as something that the life of faith requires us to doubt and wonder and ask and mistrust and think it over and ask again.

On what makes us human: When anthropologists are trying to figure out the place at which that walking anthropoid crossed the human barrier, it is when the anthropoid began to notice its mortality. I mean, that is the signature event—that we do something about mortality. Other living, breathing, sexy things don’t. Cocker spaniels, rhododendrons—they don’t bother with that stuff. They don’t seem to care about others of their kind dying. We do.

Source: Willow Springs

There are many ways to divide and limit creative possibilities, but precious few opportunities for artists to collaborate.  Cinematheque Press, an independent literary imprint out of Chicago, is providing welcome space for cross-disciplinary exploration.  Each project features some combination of text and visual, audio, or cinematic art.  Their growing catalog is impressive and includes work by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Peter Markus, Philip Jenks, and Simone Muench.  Cinematheque has also recently introduced a gorgeous online magazine, Dear Camera, whose second issue features text and film by Zachary Schomburg.  Schomburg’s “1977-2050” is both haunting and whimsical, and it’s all available with the click of a mouse. 

Sources: Cinematheque Press ; Dear Camera

Emily Pullen says she began Corpus Libris during a shift at the indie bookstore where she works. It must’ve been a slow night. The photo essay, which melds bodies with book covers, seems born of a whole lot of time to kill. I mean that in a good way, though. The photos are sweet, silly odes.

Sources: Corpus Libris, Magers and Quinn

High school field trips can be nightmarish under normal circumstances, but when your student secretly doses you with LSD, the outing isn’t likely to be fun. Luckily (or highly problematically, depending on how you look at it) John Moss had 10 years of following the Grateful Dead to train him for the experience. Writing for Bohemian.com, Moss recounts how he tried to keep his hallucinations under wraps, and keep the field trip from becoming a tragedy. Here’s a key quote: “Hallucinations were rare in my previous LSD experience, but I already had dancing trees, bouncy sidewalks and exploding flowers. Dangerous signs this early in the trip.” 

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Adapted from image by  Crystl , licensed under  Creative Commons .

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Frank Rich contended that Obama’s notably austere inaugural address signaled a necessary shift away from poetic posturing to a direct call for action. Given the current state of the nation, according to Rich, this is no time for poetry.

Chicago-based poet, blogger, and small press founder B.J. Love is making a case for poetry in a troubled world. His Further Adventures Chapbooks and Pamphlets, a small press dedicated to breaking new poets and publishing new work by established poets, takes the innovative approach of marrying work by an established writer and an emerging writer within a single entity.  For each chapbook Love selects two writers whose work he “deems compatible/coordinating/collaborative in some way,” thereby allowing their writing to riff off each other. Each poet contributes a mini-chapbook which is bound together with the other’s, allowing for a poetic conversation in concrete form.

So, is this a good time for poetry?  “People may think art is a waste of time because it’s not ‘goods’ that can be bought, sold and taxed, but down the road art is all we got,” Love says.  “The only historical documents I've read from the 1860s are the Gettysburg address, a poetic speech, and Leaves of Grass and THAT is how I understand those times, and I think years from now, poetry will still be how we understand times, these time included.”

Image by chillihead, licensed under Creative Commons.

When’s the last time you used the word adimpleate? Or obstrigillate? How about kexy? They’ve never exited my mouth, and I’m fairly certain I’ve never heard them uttered, either. Apparently, this neglect leaves them vulnerable: Every year, dictionaries drop words that have fallen into disuse. The website Save the Words works to save them from such a fate.

You can begin by browsing their store of endangered terms. For the truly committed, there are word-a-day emails and the option to adopt favorites—I’ve chosen vicambulate (to walk about in the streets), for instance. If your adopted word doesn’t roll off the tongue, Save the Words offers advice on getting them back into circulation, including:

Tattoos:  I Love Mum. Done. Anchor. Done. Celtic Symbols. Done....Tremefy? Never done!

And:

Signboard:  How about spending your lunch hour spreading the good word? That soggy salad and stale sandwich can wait while you educate the community on such insightful words as ‘scaevity’, ‘prescited’, ‘ulvose’, ‘ergote’.

Dictionaries say they trash old words to clear space for more relevant ones. Take a look at the OED’s list of their newest additions, which includes terms—like frenemy and MILF—that make me even more excited to fight for vicambulate. 

Image by Adam Smith, licensed under Creative Commmons.

Everyone makes lists: to-do lists, shopping lists, work lists. A writer at Smith puts all of my lists to shame with a list she compiled of all her lists. The results are illuminating about her and list-makers in general. My favorite section is the one labled “Neurotic?”:

Things I haven’t seen through
Number of days w/out smoking
Number of days w/out calling you know who
Number of days of exercising since resolved to exercise every single day
Things that make me sneeze
Diseases I think I might have
Other places I want to live
Other professions I might want to have
Things I wish I did more of
Things I’ve missed, skipped, cancelled, escheduled...

“In the run-up to the war in Iraq, liberal hawks were so close to neoconservative hawks that only an expert political ornithologist could distinguish between the species.” 

—Alan Wolfe, “Empty Nest: The Demise of a Species” from World Affairs (Winter 2009)

“So what’s the difference between Beatles and Stones fans? ‘Stones fans party a little more. They’re hung over every day.’ He thinks a moment. ‘Stones fans also don’t want to hear anything about the Beatles.’”

—Jack Boulware, “Now They’re Sixty-Four” from Fray (#2)

“There are few things as unattractive as the rich talking about the joys of saving money.”

—Alex Renton, “Matters of Taste” from Prospect (January 2009)

“I was in Cairo, trying desperately to interview the aging pop star Ahmed Adaweya, whose penis, depending on whom you talk to, was or was not cut off by Saudi royalty.”

—Anand Balakrishnan, “Naguib Mahfouz’s White Linen Suit” from Bidoun (#14)

For the Winter 2009 issue of The Hudson Review, the quarterly's editors have assembled a primer on non-English works from around the world. This "Translation Issue" is a heady collection, featuring excerpts from seemingly every genre and time period: classics like Antigone and Le Cid up through A Doll's House; 19^th century Japanese and Russian poetry; elegant contemporary reviews on books about language; and much, much more. Such a phenomenal swath of literary history in a single volume can't help but whet the appetite for more translated works (works that Utne, incidentally, has been championing for some time).

All the world’s a microblog, and all the men and women merely tweeters.  It’s tough to present an intelligent thought in the 140 characters allowed by Twitter, but someone has managed to summarize Shakespeare’s entire canon into tweets. Here are a few highlights: 

H: Mommy issues are just the beginning for a prince with a murdered father and new Uncle/Step-dad. Most everybody ends up dead.

TGoV: Two guys overcome both temporary exile from somewhere and their impulse-control issues and marry their long-suffering sweethearts.

KL: Old king learns too late that two of his kids only wanted power. He and most main characters die. One just gets his eyes gouged out.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Update: The blogger has moved on to translating the show MASH and the Best Picture Oscar winners into tweets, too.

It can be tough for writers to cobble together a living, so I’m always fascinated by stories of the ones who jettison the safety of a day job and insist on making their words pay the bills. Vice’s recent interview with Lee Israel, included in the Fiction Issue, paints an extreme version of this portrait. After publishing two best-selling biographies in the 70s, Israel bombed a third attempt and found herself scrambling to make ends meet. Her solution? Literary forgery: She penned and sold fake letters by literary giants like Louise Brooks and Edna Ferber, keeping at it for two years before finally getting caught.

The story of the hoax makes for good reading, but the interview is also intriguing because Vice doesn’t care much about weighing in on the ethics of Israel’s actions. Without the burden of moral outrage, Vice is able to explore the episode from other angles. The interviewer treats the letters as literary works, so many of the questions deal with Israel's writerly process—her research techniques, for instance, or the pains she took to replicate an author's tone. A few of the original letters are reprinted alongside the interview, so you can judge their merits yourself.

I am forever in awe of William T. Vollmann's ability to drill to the dark centers of humanity and emerge clear-thinking despite the "slimy, filthy grief" he experiences there. He's done it again in the latest issue of Book Forum, where he manages to articulate the most fundamental horror of the holocaust while writing his way through a sharp essay on the ethics of photography. I could feed you an excerpt here but I'm going to resist the temptation. You ought to read and wrestle with the entire piece. Snack if you must, but don't say I encouraged you in that wrongheaded endeavor.

Over at Nerve, Steve Almond parses his desire for uberconservative pundit Sean Hannity, the “angry, engorged and totally hot” object of his affection. Almond acknowledges the flaws in Hannity's character—"I find you, as a moral actor, repulsive," he writes—but a few years after appearing on Hannity's Fox News show, he just can't shake his lingering fascination with the man. "[W]hile I find your demeanor shrill and brutish," he writes, "I also find it strangely . . . alluring." 

[W]hen I appeared on your show I couldn't see you. But I could hear you—loud and clear. And that's what really captured me. The liberal in me was appalled by your hectoring. But the insecure male in me felt, I don't know. . . ravaged is probably the best word. Within ten seconds, you were interrogating me. Within twenty, you were insulting me. Within thirty, you were disgusted. There was something so raw and personal about it all.

Check out the rest of the letter here, or revisit Almond's treatises on candy bars, writing about candy bars, and how to write a sex scene.  

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Image by bobgo29, licensed under Creative Commons.

At just a year old, poet Elizabeth Alexander was in the crowd on the National Mall when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the country and proclaimed, “I have a dream.” This week, at age 46, Alexander will be in Washington D.C. for another historic moment—but this time with a front row seat.

Alexander, who is a professor of African-American studies at Yale, is the writer selected by President-elect Barack Obama to deliver an original poem at his swearing-in, a privilege bestowed on only three other poets in American history: Robert Frost, who read at JFK’s inauguration, and Maya Angelou and Miller Williams, who lent their voices to Bill Clinton's ceremonies.

In an interview with Newsweek, Alexander summed up the feelings of many art lovers, hailing Obama’s choice to include poetry in the inauguration as “an affirmation of the potential importance of art in day-to-day and civic discourse.”

For Alexander, joining the distinguished ranks of inaugural poets is certainly a high honor, but actually writing an occasional poem—verse composed for a specific event—with staying power can be a tricky task for a poet. “Once the function has passed,” writes Jim Fisher for Salon, “the poem loses the immediacy of its audience, and with it the power to summon meaning and emotion over time.”

But Alexander told NPR’s Melissa Block that she’s “challenged, not scared” by the assignment. And she seems to have crafted her poem with the predicament Fisher describes in mind. “[W]hat I’ve been able to do is ask myself how I serve the moment," she told the New York Times, “but hopefully in language that has value and resonance when the moment has passed.”

You can read some of Alexander's poems at her website, or listen to two recitations at NPR.org.

Tom Engelhardt of the Nation Institute and TomDispatch.com has drafted an inaugural address for Barack Obama. "For a president who wants to set us on a new path amid global disaster," Engelhardt says of his speech, "what better time to remember the experimental modesty with which our first presidents anxiously embarked on their journeys?"

Here, reprinted with permission, is Engelhardt's full inaugural address:

In a Dark Valley: Barack Obama's Inaugural Address

In my lifetime, presidents have regularly come before you, the American people, proclaiming new dawns or hailing this country as a shining city upon a hill, an example to the rest of the world. But on this cold, wintry day, I hardly need tell you that we seem to have joined much of the rest of the world in an increasingly shadowy, sunless valley.

We -- not just we Americans but all of us -- are living in a world in peril, one in which we have far more to fear than fear itself. And don't imagine, having just taken the oath of office on the Bible Abraham Lincoln laid his hand on in an earlier moment of national crisis, that I don't have my own fears about the task ahead. I can't help but worry whether my abilities are up to challenges, which would surely have been daunting even to a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt.

Nonetheless, you elected me. You have, I know, invested your hopes in me in these trying times. And fortunately, I sense that you are at my side now and will, I hope, remain there, encouraging and criticizing, praising or chiding as you see fit, through the worst and, with luck, the best of times. I'm thankful for that. Without your support, your wisdom, what could I hope to accomplish? We -- and in this presidency, when I use that word, I will mean you and me, not the royal "we" to which American presidents have become far too attached -- we can, I think, hope to accomplish much, but only if we're honest with ourselves.

This nation was founded in the immodest modesty of experimentation by men who hoped for much but were aware that they did not always know what might work. They were ready to falter, to fall on their faces, to fail, and yet not to quit. We -- you and I -- must be willing to do the same. In this difficult moment, we must be willing to acknowledge our limits, to admit our mistakes, and to welcome all others who care to join us, or want us to join them, on the path of experimentation in a needy world.

Let me, then, start -- not simply as your new president but as a human being, a proud American, and the father of two children who deserve a better future, not a thoroughly degraded world -- with two simple words: I'm sorry.

In the last eight years, we Americans have in no way lived up to our better natures. Our country has, in fact, repeatedly caused grievous damage to others and to ourselves. The mistakes, the misguided policies, have been legion. We -- you and I -- must do our best to correct them and make amends. For Americans, at home and abroad, there must be a better way.

The kidnapping of people off the streets of global cities, the disappearing of suspects who have no chance to face judge or jury, the torture, abuse, and killing of prisoners, these are wounds inflicted on the world and on ourselves. There must be a better way.

Shock-and-awe assaults on other nations, whether by ourselves or allies we've green-lighted, lead -- it should be clear enough by now -- to horrors beyond measure visited on civilians. There must be a better way.

The repeated firing of missiles at, and the bombing of, villages halfway across the globe, the repeated killing of innocent farm families while on missions to protect ourselves, constitutes a global war for terror, not against it. There must be a better way.

The twisting of our Constitution into whatever shape a president (and his lawyers) find useful or power-enhancing constitutes a body blow to this nation. There must be a better way.

The offering of vast bailouts, without strings or oversight, to the most profligate and greediest among us, while ignoring the daily suffering of ordinary Americans inflicts grievous harm on our society. There must be a better way.

The turning of our government -- your government -- into a surveillance state, a spy society, meant to eternally watch you cannot represent the fulfillment of the dreams of Washington or Jefferson. There must be a better way.

Transforming the heavens into a storage depot for greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is like passing a death sentence on humanity. There must be a better way.

Considering war and military action the solution of first, not last, resort whenever a difficult or painful problem arises represents a disastrous path. There must be a better way.

Of all times, this is no time to be at war. For our recent wars, all of us have paid a heavy price, not just in lives that should never have been lost, but in distraction from what truly matters.

We were once proudly a can do nation. For the last eight years, we have been a can't do nation, incapable of rebuilding great cities or small towns, replacing failing bridges or shoring up our systems of levees. And yet we've had the presumption to believe that we, who had lost the knack for rebuilding at home, had a special ability to rebuild other societies far from home. All of this has to end now. We need to do better.

Everywhere on this shaky planet people feel insecure and unsafe -- and we have only sharpened such feelings in these last years. To feel secure and safe should be the most basic of rights. It is, however, far past time for us to give the very idea of security new meaning. Yes, we must protect ourselves. Any country must do that for its citizens, but you, the American people, must also hear a truth that has not been said in these last eight years. It is a fantasy to believe that, in the long run, we can make ourselves secure to the detriment of everyone else. On that path lies only insecurity for all. We need to do better.

In policy terms, tomorrow is the day to roll up our sleeves and begin, but today I want to say to you: Don't despair. Yes, the news is grim. Yes, as Americans and as citizens of this world we should know our limits and the increasingly apparent limits of our small planet, but we should also dream, and struggle, and plan, and innovate.

I repeated one phrase many times during the long presidential campaign, and I emphatically repeat it today: Yes, we can!

And when we do, we have to reach out to the world with our discoveries and ideas, but without the sense that those discoveries, those ideas, are the be-all and end-all. We have to learn how to listen as well as teach.

Our planet will either be an ark, which will carry us, and our children and grandchildren, through time and space, or it will be our grave. This is a stark choice that seems no choice at all. But believe me, to choose the ark, not the grave, is the hardest thing of all. Nonetheless, may that be the choice to which we Americans consecrate ourselves on this day and in all the days to come.

Thank you and God bless us all.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years now ending.

Image by Joshua Bentley 

Many writers have ridiculously specific routines that they adhere to. Charles Darwin’s son Francis once mapped out his father’s daily habits down to the half-hour. Darwin’s daily schedule, and those of many other famous writers, are compiled in the Daily Routines blog. Truman Capote provides one of the funnier entries on the site:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Well-written literary sex can advance a plot, reveal fascinating character traits, and add immensely to a novel. A badly written sex scene, on the other hand, is just pornographic. The Literary Review just released their nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, including scenes from Brida by Paulo Coelho and The Reserve by Russell Banks. The awards are designed to “discourage, poorly written, redundant or excessively pornographic passages of a sexual nature in fiction,” and should come with a “not appropriate for children” warning. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Book Design Review blog just released its list of its favorite book covers from 2008. The simplicity of Jennifer Carrow’s cover for Against Happiness, book by Eric G. Wilson, makes it my favorite of the bunch.

(Thanks, Kottke and Coudal.)

Status updates and photos comments posted on Facebook provided the narration of one turbulent relationship, posted on the 26th Story blog. The author captured the saga of one anonymous couple’s love story, which would be well-known to any of the “friends” who are privy to their stories. The uncredited Bob Dylan quotes that pepper the story provide a kind of soundtrack, including this one:  

Her is a bit nervous about Wednesday.....

Her feels so serene
Him: you rock my world.

Her has known it from the moment that we met....

Her can't even remember what his lips felt like on mine....Most of the time.....

(Thanks, Newmark's Door.)

A realization just hit me like the explosion of a roman candle firing across the sky: Sarah Palin isn’t inarticulate; she’s a beat-style poet, extemporaneously constructing stream-of-consciousness, free-verse works of art during interviews. Consider this poem Palin rattled off in her recent interview with Katie Couric: 

This is crisis moment for America,
really the rest of the world also,
looking to see what the impacts will be,
if America were to choose not to shore up what has happened on Wall Street,
because of the ultimate adverse effects on Main Street
(and then how that affects this globalization that we’re a part of in our world)
so the rest of the world really is looking at John McCain:
the leadership that he’s going to provide through this,
and if those provisions in the proposal can be implemented
and make this proposal better—
make it 
          make more sense 
                    to taxpayers 
                              then again,
John McCain is going to prove his leadership.

Now compare that to the beginning of Howl by Allen Ginsberg:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,

Or this quote from the same Sarah Palin interview:

But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the, it’s got to be all about job creation, too: shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track, so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief, for Americans, and trade—we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that more as more opportunity—all those things under the umbrella of job creation, this bailout is a part of that.

And compare that to a quote from On the Road by Jack Kerouac:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!

You can watch a clip of Palin’s poetic genius below:

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was one of 25 “geniuses” to net one of this year’s prestigious MacArthur fellowships. We knew we had a special talent in our pages when we reprinted this lovely, touching piece of hers back in our March-April issue. Enjoy the read. And enjoy her reaction to news of the award, as quoted in the New York Times:

Ms. Adichie was celebrating her birthday and taking a bath when the phone call came. “I was thrilled and grateful,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Lagos. “I like to say that America is like my distant uncle who doesn’t remember my name but occasionally gives me pocket money. That phone call filled me with an enormous affection for my uncle!”

Villains almost always make better characters than heroes. It’s easy to understand why a person would want to be the knight in shining armor, but exploring the psyche of a “bloody, bawdy villain” like Claudius from Hamlet or O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four is always more interesting and fun. The British newspaper Telegraph has compiled a nefariously enjoyable list of the 50 greatest villains in literature. It’s a list so evil, the devil himself would enjoy it.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Image by J.J. McCullough, licensed under GNU.

In an article in Damn Interesting, Christopher S. Putnam tells the little-known but highly relevant case of George John Dasch, a German saboteur whose attempted defection during World War II was betrayed by J. Edgar Hoover. Putnam offers a taut narrative, which concludes with the startling revelation of how the Dasch case informs military policy regarding enemy combatants in the "war on terror."

“Attractive instructors are popular instructors. Popular instructors fill classes. More students mean more revenue,” Norma Desmond (a pseudonym) writes matter-of-factly for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Which is why toward the end of her job search, knowing she’d been typecast as an aging adjunct professor, Desmond decided to get Botox injections.

There’s so much emotional hype surrounding cosmetic surgery (who’s had it, who hasn’t, who never would, and who’s lying), that sometimes a really simple thing gets lost in the fray: Looks matter. Looks impact our lives. Good, bad, fair, unfair, frustrating—they do.

That’s what’s so fantastic about Desmond’s essay: She just tells the truth. As someone who “spent [her] middle years feeling slightly sorry for people who have felt the need to have their skin stretched tight as drumheads,” Desmond lucidly explains how she came to find herself sitting in a doctor’s chair.

—Julie Hanus

Image by  dawninmanswedding , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Messages conveyed through bathroom graffiti exist in a world of their own, somewhere between the bounds of taste and repugnance, lacking the privacy of a diary but too ephemeral and obscure to truly be part of the public domain. They are personal statements momentarily pushed into view, yet destined for erasure. In part, this transience is what makes Steve Featherstone’s visual essay in the Walrus about graffiti in the latrines of U.S. soldiers serving in Kuwait and Afghanistan such an appealing project. His pictures capture something that those of us living stateside could never otherwise have seen. The scrawlings are both foreign and familiar: macho anger, smack-talk between soldiers and, above all, homesickness. The messages don’t come together to form some cohesive, revelatory narrative, as much as we might wish them to. 

Featherstone doesn’t read too much into what’s written on the privy walls. As a whole, the messages serve as a window into one of the world’s shitholes, not a codex for understanding conflict in the Middle East or the meaning of warfare. They are what they are, “fleeting moment[s] in a six year-old war—nothing more. The words on these walls are snatches of an overheard and ongoing conversation that changes by the day, soldier’s talking to other soldiers at a time when soldiers are being asked to give more than they have been giving, which is already too much.”

—Morgan Winters

Image by  Russell Bernice , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

High-end prostitutes are all the rage, both in politics and, now, in bookstores. Howard Jacobson does a roundup for Prospect of recent memoirs and novels written by former prostitutes, with the intent of examining both the insight and the fairytales they offer readers. This is not a compilation of book reviews, but an airing out of controversial opinions and an unflinching examination of societal views regarding prostitution.  

Jacobson examines three books—Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and The Scorpion's Sweet Venom: The Diary of a Brazilian Call Girl—in an attempt to understand the dichotomous perception of prostitution and its effects on its practitioners. It is apparent, based on both the amount and manner of coverage Ashley Dupré received following the Eliot Spitzer scandal, that we are divided on what to make of the sex trade. While one would be hard pressed to find a person willing to recommend it as a career choice, prostitution is a guilty pleasure that tantalizes our imagination, men and women alike. And while most of us see the selling of one’s body as a sad and dangerous act, we also fantasize about being so desired as to merit Dupré’s $1000-an-hour price tag and career-sacrificing allure. It isn’t just high-end call girls like Dupré that hold this forbidden appeal. In Story of O, the infamous 1950s French tale of erotic submission, the protagonist derives pleasure from her debasement at the hands of her lovers. “Isn't that what O pursues,” Jacobson asks, “the sensation of nothing mattering, least of all herself? And isn't that why some men visit prostitutes, for the intense experience of abnegation associated with payment, for which next to nothing is given and next to nothing is felt?” The three prostitutes-turned-writers seem to think so.    

It would be unwise to read too much into these books, or to form an opinion on the complexities of the sex trade—or sex trades, as Jacobson argues that there are multiple castes within the prostitution industry—based solely on their authors’ stories. There seems to be two basic motivations for writing about one’s tenure as a hooker, neither educational: The prostitute either wants to glorify or vilify the industry and its consumers. Either of these seems simplistic and disingenuous. After all, not only are we talking about the oldest profession, we’re also trying to understand arguably the most complicated physiological aspect of nature—sex—through books about themes that, if authored by anybody other than former prostitutes, would fall under the “teen” section in the local library, as Jacobson points out.

Jacobson’s article makes a thoughtful case for infusing the prostitution debate with more perspective. The exchange of sex for money among adults is a multifaceted issue, one that deserves more than the hysterical diatribes of opponents, sensational portrayal by media, and perfunctory “keep laws out of the bedroom” refrain from decriminalization supporters. While the books themselves don’t offer a solution, at least a critically astute discussion of them raises the level of discourse.   

 —Morgan Winters

“For an obscenity to work, it must be both inside and outside speech,” Ian Coutts explains in Quill & Quire (article not available online). Obscenities begin as ordinary words until, as children, we are told they are bad. “The power of obscenity comes from this paradox,” Coutts writes. “We must never say those words, but obviously we do—or they would be lost to all time.”

Obscenities are more than just paradoxical pleasures: They both separate us from and join us to the animal world, writes Coutts. Whereas an animal might yelp or cry in pain, humans have words to articulate these feelings. (Oh, s#$% that smarts!) But even as obscene language separates us from our animal kin, these naughty words also often refer to copulation and defecation, two of the fundamental functions we share with other living things.

Obscenities evolve with our culture, so as society becomes increasingly comfortable with bodily functions, Coutts predicts fresh swear words will emerge to reflect whatever is deemed newly unmentionable.

—Sarah Pumroy

Looks like 2008 is going to be a bumper year for graphic adaptations of U.S. history. Metropolitan Books just released A People’s History of American Empire, based on a chapter of Howard Zinn’s 1980 classic A People’s History of the United States. Cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian Paul Buhle collaborated on the luxurious 8½-by-11 book, which utilizes Zinn’s text as narration. (Check out his style in our Sept.-Oct. 2007 excerpt of A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.) Historical photographs play into some of the frames, providing a cool contrast to Konopacki’s lively illustrations.

Then—and you’ll have to wait awhile for these—we recently received a booklet previewing two more graphic adaptations, both of them forthcoming from publisher Hill and Wang. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, the duo responsible for The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, will be back in bookstores this August with After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001-  ). Then, in October, look for The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, written by Jonathan Hennessy and illustrated by Aaron McConnell.

—Julie Hanus

Poetry magazine steps into the international realm in its April 2008 issue, “The Translation Issue,” which contains poems from around the globe translated into English from 18 languages. The conversion of words and ideas from one language to another can be a challenging task, and it's not always that readers get a glimpse of this involved process. In this case, however, a short essay written by the translator accompanies each poem. “Like the ‘columns, arches, vaults’ of an edifice, the abstract proportions of poetry—as of any art—make promises they cannot keep: a world of perfection, beyond chance and change,” writes Hoyt Rogers following his translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s, “San Biagio, at Montepulciano.” Three poems are featured on the magazine’s website, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the issue if you want to read them all.

—Sarah Pumroy

Heidi Swanson, the writer-photographer-foodie behind 101Cookbooks.com, made me fall in love with Brussels sprouts last year, when she published Super Natural Cooking. Seems she impressed some, ah, slightly more professional palates as well: Swanson's cookbook has recently been short-listed for a 2008 James Beard Foundation Award in the category of "healthy focus."

We caught up with the multitalented Swanson in our July/August 2007 issue. Check out what she had to say about her award-worthy cookbook and getting away from processed foods, and then go cook up some of her signature golden-crusted sprouts.

—Julie Hanus

Tell us about your favorite cookbook in the Great Writing Salon.

Think of poetry as dry or inaccessible? First, read Utne editor Julie Hanus’ post on why readers shouldn’t dismiss the field of poetry as a whole. Next, check out poetry set to animation on YouTube; it may change your mind yet. Ad agency JWT-NY has produced videos that feature former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins reading his poems set to delightful animation. Collins’ poems are known for being popular and accessible to begin with, but the added animation is intended to draw people in with even greater ease. I especially enjoyed the eeriness of “Some Days,” embedded below.

(Thanks, The Tyee.)

—Sarah Pumroy

We need more novelists and poets to be translators, writes Stephen Henighan in the April Quill & Quire (article not available online). While he’s addressing mainly his Canadian audience, his observations certainly pertain south of the border: Multilingualism, as he makes clear, used to be part and parcel of a thriving literary culture.

In the 19^th century, many Europeans would have read in both their native language and in French, while in times previous, a working knowledge of Latin and Greek predominated among the literati. More recently, translators have acted as aesthetic gatekeepers, spurring affection for Russian literature in the 1930s and for French existentialism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

These days, however, as Henighan points out, two of the most “internationalized cultures—the Anglo-American and the Muslim-Arabic—have the planet’s lowest rates of translation activity,” a claim that lends itself to our image of East-West misapprehension.

Though such socio-politics are central to the argument in favor of translating literature, Henighan emphasizes the creativity associated with multilingualism. He mentions, for two examples, the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende. Both honed their idiosyncrasies through the study and translation of languages foreign to them. Translation is therefore vital not only for the health of communication between cultures, but also for the renovation of literary style.

—Michael Rowe

Mary Oliver is slight, silver-haired, and sweet-mother-of-mercy, as wily as the day is long. She’s superbly sharp and has impeccable timing, a bemused smile often nipping at the corners of her mouth. So as I sat, rapt, this past Sunday at the State Theatre, listening to the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet read, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why wasn’t there a line around the block? Why don’t more people get fired up about poetry?                                          

Don’t get me wrong: A robust, enthusiastic crowd turned out for the event, which kicked off the Literary Legends Series, a joint venture of the Hennepin Theatre Trust and the Loft, Minneapolis’ literary center extraordinare. In box-office terms, I’ve no doubt it was a success. But Oliver’s reading was so damn good—so powerful, so lively, so entertaining and uplifting—that I yearned to fill a coliseum with people at her attention.

Oliver read from her new collection, Red Bird, from 2006’s Thirst, and from her memoir of last year, Our World, which pairs her prose with photographs by her partner Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005. As Oliver read, the friends who had demurred to come rattled through my head, followed by people I hadn’t even originally thought to invite, but who I now was certain would have relished the reading too. Almost everyone who’d turned me down had offered the same (ahem, old) excuse: It doesn’t sound like my thing. I don’t really like poetry.

A bemused smile nipped at the corners of my mouth when Oliver herself sagely addressed the issue. “A long time ago, I realized that people who read poetry were pre-converted,” she said. “And that people who didn’t, rarely convert.”

“But,” Oliver continued wryly, “that anyone who has a curiosity to start a sentence would finish it.” So, sometimes, she challenges herself to craft windy, multi-line poems that, with a little help from creative punctuation, carry a reader along from start to finish in a single swoop. By way of illustration, she read “The Sun,” which begins with a simple question (“Have you ever seen / anything / in your life / more wonderful”) and then diverts into a circuitous celebration of the heavenly body. “Have you ever felt for anything / such wild love—,” Oliver wants to know.

Just when I thought my heart was going to burst, she concluded:

“or have you too / turned from this world / or have you too / gone crazy / for power, / for things?”

Oh, and my heart did burst, but in a good way—in a very Oliver way. “I tell you this / to break your heart, / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world,” she writes in “Lead.” It was that moment that made me wish I could share that evening at the State Theatre with everyone I know. Oliver’s humanistic approach to the world is exquisitely bittersweet, full of rich humor and mindful observation, equal parts joyful and sad.

We pay ourselves a disservice every time we dismiss poetry as a lump sum. Oh, I don’t like poetry. Really? None of it? It’s as strange a statement as saying you don’t like music (nope, not one note). But we don’t say strange things like that about music, because for the most part we’re equipped with sufficient acoustic literacy to recognize genres, make aesthetic judgments, and sort out what is pleasing from what is displeasing to our ears.

With poetry, such facility is hardly the standard, and that’s OK; I’ve no illusions about poems suddenly gaining top-40 appeal. But I do secretly suspect that somewhere out there, there’s a poem or a poet that would tickle everyone’s fancy, as instantly and effortlessly as you know that you love a certain song the first time you hear it play. Encountering a few poems, however, and then dismissing the entire field, seems a bit like scanning the radio for a few minutes and then deciding all this noise, this so-called music, is not for you.

The loss, of course, isn’t that people might miss out on poetry; certainly not everybody must have affection for every single art. It’s that the broad-stroke dismissal throws a hurdle up between people and great thinkers like Mary Oliver, whose work would otherwise most likely startle, electrify, and delight.

—Julie Hanus

Love poetry? Hate it? Tell us what you think in the Great Writing Salon.

A novel begins as a whiff of an idea that a writer's scribbles then give flesh. But most books remain unwritten. The British newspaper the Independent asked ten contemporary authors about the books they had failed to write. My favorite responses were from Will Self, who wanted to write a superhero saga about unremarkable people—an idea squashed by the recent television hit Heroes—and the gutsy premise behind D.J. Taylor’s “religio-political epic” God: The Novel. Maybe some enterprising creative writers in our readership will take up their pens and complete these unfinished potential masterworks?

—Brendan Mackie