May 2012
28 posts
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“Digital content delivery not only places user privacy at risk; it can facilitate...”
– A Digital Dilemma: Ebooks and Users’ Rights | American Libraries Magazine (via infoneer-pulse)
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“The story is a running scroll of a spy keeping a log of her current mission. Ms....”
– “A Jennifer Egan Original … Tweet by Tweet”
The New Yorker will be publishing a new fiction piece in the next issue by Jennifer Egan, written entirely in tweets. This reminded me of her short story published in The Guardian last summer in list form.
It’s sort of funny that Egan is taking on this...
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“Libraries cannot fail to provide their readers with digitized material,...”
– In Defense of the New York Public Library by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books (via marincitylibrary)
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When I see our magazine on a newsstand...
Yup. Every AGNI sighting.
allisonmanning:
This is the face I made on Friday when I saw a man reading my story on the plane. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and be like HEY! THAT’S ME.
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“I once heard Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College, compare books to...”
– Rhizome | Screen. Image. Text. (via thisistheverge)
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“In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do—if he has to...”
– Malcolm Cowley in response to a letter asking whether one should pursue an MFA.
In the comments section, novelist Helen DeWitt serves a searing retort:
“…if he has to write, why then, he writes…” This is roughly what my penultimate agent, Bill Clegg, had to say on the subject. This is not so much...
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Poets Ranked By Beard Weight →
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)Beard type: Hibernator Typical opus: O Captain! My Captain! Gravity/UPI rating: 22
Because…because, why not.
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Judge comes down hard on publishers, Apple in... →
infoneer-pulse:
In a strongly worded opinion, US District Judge Denise Cote rejected requests by Apple and five book publishers to throw out a class action suit that accuses them of price-fixing.
Citing ongoing state, federal and international antitrust investigations, Cote turned down arguments that Apple and the publishers had acted independently when they changed the pricing model for...
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Is Typing Changing the Way We Think? →
And, if it changes the way we think—the way we write?
teachingliteracy:
infoneer-pulse:
According to a new study exploring the interrelation of language and emotion, if a word consists of letters typed with predominantly the right hand, it is felt to be more positive in meaning; a word typed predominantly with the left hand is associated more with negative emotion.
The study included...
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“How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I...”
– Maurice Sendak, who died today at 83, discusses creativity and his latest work, ‘Bumble-Ardy,’ in an interview with The Atlantic. Read more. (via theatlantic)
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“I’m a magpie for weird words.”
– Cathy Park Hong, quoted in The Paris Review (via wwnorton)
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After Warning Amazon About Sales Tactics, Target... →
infoneer-pulse:
Like other big retailers, Target has been trying to figure out how to stop Amazon shoppers from visiting Target stores to check out products, and then buy them online from Amazon. It is a practice encouraged by Amazon; over the Christmas holiday, for example, the company offered a promotion on its Price Check app that gave shoppers 5 percent off any item scanned at a store.
Now...
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“We think, in some ways, we have done this our whole lives, searching for the...”
– The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown (via dontbedefeatistdear)
April 2012
13 posts
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“A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical...”
– E.B. White (via amandaonwriting)
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No Silence in the Fields reviewed at Weave...
The Messy Business of Bodies: Rachel Mennies’ No Silence in the Fields Rachel Mennies’ debut e-chapbook collection No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press, 2012) is a heartbreaking narrative of a couple’s love that breaks beneath the cold realities of winter. The scene is set in the first poem, “The Barn,” which wonders, “Whose red shoebox, whose poisoned apple.” This list-poem first...
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New Work at Witness →
Two new poems at Witness, and one of them’s available online for your perusal and e-book download.
Amidah for Teenage Girls
We said it Friday nights in unison: blessed is Abraham, Isaac, patriarchs whose weight we felt against our chests, Jacob, whose brother
filled his mouth with the sand of hate, who split sisters with his body of patience. The God of History, reads
the Siddur,...
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Make-or-Break Verbs - NYTimes.com →
teachingliteracy:
A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting.
What makes the difference? The verb.
Verbs kick-start sentences: Without them, words would simply cluster together in suspended animation. We often call them action words, but verbs also can carry sentiments (love, fear, lust, disgust), hint at cognition...
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“Amazon is squeezing everyone out of business,” said Randall White, EDC’s chief...”
– Amazon’s E-Book Pricing a Constant Thorn for Publishers - NYTimes.com (via infoneer-pulse)
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NPM Daily: Rachel Mennies →
npmdaily:
Rachel Mennies is the reviews editor at AGNI. Her chapbook No Silence in the Fields was published in February 2012 by Blue Hour Press. Recent poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, and Witness. She won the Leonard Steinberg/Academy of American Poets Prize and received her MFA in Poetry from Penn State, both in 2011. She...
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“We should think about being less prescriptive and more encouraging when it comes...”
– The Bookavore’s Dilemma (via bookriot)
Re: the “Slow Read” movement, which takes as its manifesto “Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.” What do you think?
(via aaknopf)
March 2012
20 posts
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Where Are They Now? An Interview with Hayden's...
Hayden’s Ferry Review: Tell us a little bit about “Barrenness is like a Large, Hungry Gull.”
Rachel Mennies: This poem started with the title simile, which came into my head whole like some sort of absurd joke. And I chased after the punch line—I wanted to know why A was like B, why my brain put this information together. It was one of the rare (for me) poems that requires only minimal revision once the first draft comes together. After the simile took root, I started toying with it. What would it be like to live with this wild animal in your home, situated between you and another person: a frustration that cannot be resolved because its origins are inherent, seemingly unfixable to the speaker? And the sonnet form felt natural to me for this piece, since the poem pivots between stanzas and shoots outward—how many others must have this same wild frustration? Am I alone in my suffering? It’s also rare for me, and I wonder if it should be so rare, to play with fantasy, the sort of magic that’s present in the bird. The speaker sees this creature as very real, and it feels real to me: it takes over their house, growing to fill it and ever hungry.
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“The most important thing is sitting and talking with your children,” said...”
– Bringing Up a Young Reader on E-Books - NYTimes.com (via infoneer-pulse)
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Feminist Poet Adrienne Rich Dies At 82 : NPR →
What Kind of Times Are These
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere...
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A Slow Books Manifesto
theatlantic:
A Slow Books Manifesto: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Why so much emphasis on what goes into our mouths, and so little on what goes into our minds? What about having fun while exerting greater control over what goes into your brain? Why hasn’t a hip alliance emerged that’s concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our...
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Freshman Composition Is Not Teaching Key Skills in... →
infoneer-pulse:
Students in first-semester composition classes are routinely assigned to write a research paper, but this exercise rarely succeeds because they do not yet grasp how to analyze their sources, say the chief researchers of a multi-institutional study of college students’ citations.
“We need to be teaching analysis, and a lot of it,” Rebecca Moore Howard, professor of writing and...
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Prosody 101 →
wwnorton:
When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference, I understood yet didn’t understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with the trees already lacy and camellias blowsy with middle age, I looked out and saw what a cold...