About Books & Literature

"ARTINFO continues its list of the 40 books every artist should own, following up Part 1 with another 20 essential picks for your library." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

"The unique method of repeating kanji in a grid pattern in poem “Ame” (Rain). As part of the wave of modernism that swept over all fields of art in the 20th century, poets boldly began to analyze language structurally instead of merely concentrating on its semantic content." http://www.nmao.go.jp/english... "Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. The French poet Pierre Guarnieri, collaborating with the Japanese poet Seiichi Niikuni, also used the term spatiality in relation to concrete poetry, implying that the white space between words also holds meaning. Poets emphasized that language is not only a means of communication, but that language also has a material dimension.” - Amira

"Harold Bloom famously dubbed it the "anxiety of influence" (paywall): the effect which the literary canon has on writers. Less today than it did in the past, according to a mathematical study which analysed thousands of works written over the last 500 years. (...) Using digitised works in the Project Gutenberg library, they processed 7,733 works from 537 authors written after the year 1550, were looking for the frequency at which 307 "content-free" words – such as "of", "at" and "by" – appeared. They called these words the "syntactic glue" of language: "words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning", and thus "provide a useful stylistic fingerprint" for authorship. (...) After finding that authors of any given period are stylistically similar to their contemporaries, they also discovered that the stylistic influence of the past is decreasing. While authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead "strongly influenced" by writers from their own decade." - Amira

"The so-called 'anxiety of influence', whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an 'anxiety of impotence', in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present," they write. This could, they suggest, be explained by the modernist movement, in which authors "reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain... more... - Amira

Harvard literary scholar Leah Price "argues that literary critics should stop assuming that reading is the most important thing people do with books. (...) We tend to think of literature as something that ties individuals and cultures together, but as books proliferated in the Victorian era they often drove people apart. (...) With so many new books, and so many new readers, a few Victorians began investing books themselves with symbolic power. For the first time, Price suggests, these people turned books into something special—into something you shouldn’t write in or treat like a decoration. Up to this point, reading books was rare enough that the act itself made you stand out. “People took for granted that you could use a book for all kinds of things,” Price says. But for all of these reasons, that began to change with the Victorians. “This was the moment where you start to become embarrassed about these nontextual uses,” she says, “where you start to say, ‘Other people do these... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Fr. "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature" is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine." - Amira

I wonder if it's not just a matter of not entering the appropriate HTML command, however, it should be noted in footnote or introduction. - Amira

"Like novelists, mathematicians are creative authors. With diagrams, symbolism, metaphor, double entendre and elements of surprise, a good proof reads like a good story. (...) [Reviel] Netz reveals the stunning stylistic similarities between Hellenistic poetry and mathematical texts from the same era. (...) In the very layout, in the use of a particular formulaic language, in the structuring of the text (...) its success or failure depends entirely on features residing in the text itself. It is really an activity very powerfully concentrated around the manipulation of written documents, more perhaps than anywhere else in science, and comparable, then, to modern poetry. (...) Metaphor is fairly standard in mathematics. Mathematics can only become truly interesting and original when it involves the operation of seeing something as something else – a pair of similarly looking triangles, say, as a site for an abstract proportion; a diagonal crossing through the set of all real numbers." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Indeed, Amira, linguists have mostly ignored the grammar and syntax of hand gestures which is more primitive than oral or written communication. We implicitly accept its deep structure and understand its rich semantics, conveying more than words sometimes :-) - Adriano

"Between 1951 and 1953, Isaac Asimov published three books that formed the now famous Foundation Trilogy. Many considered it a masterwork in science fiction, and that view became official doctrine in 1966 when the trilogy received a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, notably beating out Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Eventually, the BBC decided to adapt Asimov’s trilogy to the radio, dramatizing the series in eight one-hour episodes that aired between May and June 1973. Thanks to The Internet Archive you can download the full program as a zip file, or stream it online." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"A truly unique work of fiction, ‘The Codex Seraphinianus‘ is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini, explains the odd inhabitants and their colorful behaviors. The book was created between 1976 and 1978 and for the low price of about $500.00 you can ponder over your own copy." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Online, or old school dial +1-347-763-8001 to hear a poem from a wide range of esteemed poets via the Museum of Modern Art -- wait for John Cage, or the one by Robert Creely #poetry - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: “More than 90 percent.” (...) That’s not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews. Hammond was recently asked for his reaction to a prediction that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize within 20 years. He disagreed. It would happen, he said, in five. (...) To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers. (For baseball, the meta-writers seem to have relied heavily on famed early-20th-century sports columnist Ring Lardner. People are always whacking home runs, swiping bags, tallying runs, and stepping up to the dish.) The company calls its finished product “the narrative.” (...) Users can customize the tone of any story—from breathless financial reporter to dry analyst. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers get more accomplished... more... - Amira

"TV shows and films give them the dangerous idea that great authors just wait to get inspired, and then genius pours out of their pens in an unstoppable flood. The reality is different. Writers—especially the great ones—mostly sit at desks feeling rotten, struggling to write crumpled sentences that they can smooth into something acceptable. (This may be part of the reason that writers have higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and suicide). The science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote hilarious, poignant novels like Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Galapagos. But most days he didn't feel like a poignant genius. "When I write," Vonnegut said, "I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The less punctuation marks, taken in isolation, convey meaning or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in language names, the more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means exhaused by it. (...) Even text, even the most densely woven, cites them of its own accord -- friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language. There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon. (...) - Amira

Thoroughly enjoyable. - Goran Zec

all these years, I never knew what I was seeing in books... "In novels you have *** to break up chapters. What are those *** called, the three asterisks, stars, etc? A dinkus doesn't have to be 3 asterisks and may be shown as another symbol." \\ Versus an _ellipsis_ which is "a series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted," most commonly indicated by ... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The genre of the graphic memoir, either autobiographical or historical or biographical, has been around in one form or another throughout the history of comics. It has considerably expanded over the last 10 years, however, and it's now a substantial and popular presence in the wide spectrum of graphic novels. Like the word to describe the medium – "comics" – the marketing term "graphic novel" for comics-in-book-form is a misnomer, but it seems we're now stuck with it. Graphic novels dealing with a personal story are the subject of this selection. As a genre, these are placed in the nonsensical category "non-fiction graphic novels," which underlines the inadequacy of the term." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

"Take part in our audio quiz to find out which famous novel is being rendered in this sound" - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

I got one right just by listening, and all of them right on the quiz page http://www.guardian.co.uk/books... - Que Sarah Sarah

"Hook readers quickly, perhaps by having a naked young woman chomped in half or a man murdered by an albino monk. Don't dillydally with needless personal detail. Once hooked, customers must be goaded to keep turning the pages, the quicker the better. Protagonists with mass-market appeal tend to be mavericks, misfits or loners and that they often come from fractured families and communities. All the books surveyed include at least one central sexual incident." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"With a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, Shakespeare and Company is arguably the most iconic bookshop in the French capital. The building, a 17th century ex-monastery has become a landmark in the 5th arrondissement. Apart from being a bookstore, it also serves as a haven where aspiring writers can stay for free - Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin have both been guests in the past. Originally established in 1919 by an American called Sylvia Beach, fellow expatriate George Whitman took over Shakespeare and Company after Beach's death in 1951. Crane.tv meets with Whitman's daughter, Sylvia to hear about the future of this historical, literary gem." Address: 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005, Paris. http://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/ - Amira from Bookmarklet

"While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures." In A Cultural History of Physics, Hungarian scientist and educator Károly Simonyi succeeds in bridging this chasm by describing the experimental methods and theoretical interpretations that created scientific knowledge, from ancient times to the present day, within the cultural environment in which it was formed. Unlike any other work of its kind, Simonyi’s seminal opus explores the interplay of science and the humanities to convey the wonder and excitement of scientific development throughout the ages." - Amira from Bookmarklet

A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods. - Amira from Bookmarklet

almost looks a Loeb edition of Pindar odes :-) - Adriano

:-) - Amira

1984, Fahrenheit 451, Mrs. Dalloway, Brave New World, My Name is Mina, The Amber Spyglass - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

My Top 5 : Animal Farm,1984,Fahrenheit 451,Homage to Catalonia,The Stranger - mohammadk

Ok, I will play. My top five: One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Alchemist; The Forever War; Time Enough for Love; 1984. (and a bonus: The Martian Chronicles). - Angel R. Rivera

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) - Amira

I love that opening line of Murphy :) - Eivind

“The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

new version http://metaphors.lib.virginia.edu/ - Amira

See also James Geary, metaphorically speaking - TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks... - Amira

"Every writer who visits a school gets asked this question: where do ideas come from? The standard response is to quote Douglas Adams ("Ideas R Us in Swindon"), but I feel uncomfortable fobbing off children with one-liners." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

“This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia. It could even (if we want to get all grand and optimistic) turn out to be a Gutenberg-style revolution—not for writing, this time, but for reading. Book readers have never had a mechanism for massively and easily sharing their responses to a text with other readers, right inside the text itself.” (...) Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation. Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work. (...) A book someone has written in is an oddly intimate object; like an item of clothing once worn by a person now passed away, it retains something of its former owner’s presence. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

how do you feel about loaning out books with lots of personal marginalia ? - Adriano

Since sometimes they look like a personal notebooks, usually I'm not loaning them out. :-) - Amira

"In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. (...) In recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. (...) “We have very different value propositions,” Mr. Cauz said. “Britannica is going to be smaller. We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity. But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct." - Amira

I have an electronic dictionary with Encyclopaedia Britannica for six years ago. Is this a trend of the times? - Ami Iida

on the wisdom of crowds: how often does one see facts in Wikipedia referenced by anything from Britannica? - Adriano

"Fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation. Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, labourers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: "Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear." Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother's work was Von Schönwerth. (...) "Schönwerth's legacy counts as the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the 19th century," - Amira from Bookmarklet

Oooh I love fairytales - Shevonne

"Richmond, California - In a wooden warehouse in this industrial suburb, the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster. Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age. (...) “We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.” (...) “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

See also video: Mankind has produced an estimated 100 million books. Brewster Kahle, the founder of Internet Archive has begun collecting one copy of each book that has ever been printed http://ff.im/J1xRM - Amira

"Has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing". My hunch is that using a word processor makes writing more like sculpting in clay. Because it's so easy to revise, one begins by hacking out a rough draft which is then iteratively reshaped – cutting bits out here, adding bits there, gradually licking the thing into some kind of shape. (...)" - Amira

See also: "The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute" http://www.nytimes.com/2011... - Amira

"Villains define the heroes. Sometimes those villains, like the Joker, have been set up as the perfect counterpoint to the good guy. Sometimes they're set up as the personification of a primal fear that lurks within us all. But the great villains, the truly great villains, exist beyond the page. They live on after you've closed the book. Here are 10 of my favourites..."" - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

"One of the great things about being a reader is that over time, the books on your shelf seem to start talking to one another. Themes echo and resurface and resonate in new ways. That's why in February, NPR's Backseat Book Club — our monthly feature aimed at young readers — selected a pair of books published 60 years apart that still seem to speak directly to each other." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet