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Absurdist Literature Stimulates Our Brains
"Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does!"
Learning to love poetry again
Most of the comments are pathetic (and some illustrate perfectly why so many people get turned off of it), but I appreciated reading one person's story of coming to care for poetry again. Who cares if his philosophy aligned... poets and poetry-lovers should appreciate someone else joining the fold.
Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work
"There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le's "The Boat," one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn't include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the "Twilight" series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You'll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they're lazy and can't hack it in the big leagues. But that's not the case. They need something they're not getting elsewhere. Let's be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because "The Hunger Games" doesn't bore them. "
Against Readings - Mark Edmundson
If you are interested in reading, literature and criticism-- this is a must-read.
Annie Finch: Listening to Poetry
"Essentially, poetry is distinguished as an art not by its basis in thinking, reading, and understanding—all the processes we use to encounter other kinds of language—but in something both more humble and more refined than any of these: listening to the physical resonance of the words of the poem within the internal space of our own minds."
Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment
Sweet bookmarket that makes a much more readable version of most pages. via @sleslie
McCulture
"The world has noticed our resistance to translation. The head of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, caused a furor last fall when he dismissed American literature several days before the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a Frenchman many Americans had never heard of. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” Engdahl told The Associated Press, explaining why he sees Europe, not the United States, as the center of the literary world. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” Engdahl stated the case too strongly, but I hear his worry—that the way Americans read is making us smaller.
It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting required to make a cultural connection."
Internet searches stimulate brain more than books • The Register
No idea what to make of the results, but FMRI research is neat to look at...
Stager-to-Go: Recommended Books for Holiday Gifts
Great recommendations here, some I was familiar with, some not... almost none of which will be found on typical edblogger/edtech/etc lists.
Poet's Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art
From Bell to Coolidge, Pinsky to Edson... a wide variety of poets share 5-10 books influential on themselves and their art
Rumors of Glory: Remembering Auden - Books & Culture Magazine
in the early 1940s Auden began writing poems that scarcely anyone knew how to read—that scarcely anyone even today knows how to read
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times {ed. Kevin Smokler}
The goal of this collection of essays from some of America's younger or emerging novelists is to disprove the dire warnings regarding the disappearance of a reading public.
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