Literacy Encyclopedia

The Literary Encyclopedia is an expanding global literary reference work written by over 1400 specialists from universities around the world, and currently provides over 3700 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics.

Via Presurfer

Seek My Face

Seek My Face, published in 2002, was John Updike's twentieth book. Does practice make perfect? In this case I'd say yes. The title comes from Psalm 27: "You speak in my heart, and say 'Seek my face'. Your face, Lord, will I seek."

This novel is essentially the internal musings of an old woman, Hope Chafetz, who is being interviewed by a much younger, ambitious New York journalist. It unfolds over the course of an early spring day in Hope's rural Vermont home. Hope is of interest to the interviewer because of her involvement with some of the great American artists of the mid 1900s. There is a very skillful balance of the past and present. Updike's renowned attention to detail is present throughout, notably in Hope's attention to food. She wants to provide her interrogator with sustenance, however meagre and old personish.

Hope is an amalgam of Lee Krasner (Hope is short, has bangs and is married to the Pollack-like Zack), Helen Frankenthaler (Hope's paintings, as described, resemble Frankenthaler's) and their ilk. The Flats described in the novel is The Springs, in the Hamptons, where Krasner and Pollack lived. Hope is an artist whose talent was put on the back burner while she tended to the considerable needs of her artist superstar husbands (although Krasner only married once). We are given a heady blend of art history and fiction. The first husband, Zack, is based on Jackson Pollack; the second, strangely enough, on the blatantly gay Andy Warhol crossed with Roy Lichenstein. Updike takes liberties because this is fiction, after all. It is a story of the rise, post WW2, of the American abstract expressionists. It's also a bit of a game called Guess the Artist and I admit I had fun with it.

My advice: if you like Updike and art you'll like this. I did.

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words

Do you know what a snollygoster is? Would you eat something called a muktuk? Do you know anyone who engages in onolatry? Impress your friends and pepper your dinner party conversations with such nuggets as gobemouche, mumpsimus, and cachinnate. You can learn about all of these bizarre and beautiful words and many more in Totally Weird and Wonderful Words. Edited by Erin McKean.

A Book Vending Machine?

On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. This technology and process will produce one each of ten different books at the same speed and cost as it can produce ten copies of the same book. ODB has two machines currently deployed (one at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington DC, and one at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt). ODB is also finalizing technology to access a vast network of content that can be accessed and produced via The Espresso Book Machine Network. The content of this library will reside in numerous locations from a multitude of sources. Our system will accept multiple formats, and fully respect licenses and rights.

Via J-Walk

I must have this book

I saw it on The Paris Blog.

The Babes In The Wood

It's been a long time since I read a Ruth Rendell mystery but I felt I needed a diversion. My good friend Chief Inspector Wexford has aged in the interim and I found myself impatient with him in the way younger people lose patience with the old and out of touch. Only I'm not so much younger; he's not yet reached retirement age, after all.Wexford's stodginess is certainly part of the appeal of the series, though.

It rains a lot in this book, buckets and buckets day after day. Two teenagers go missing along with their 30ish caregiver and it is initially assumed that they drowned. Throughout the course of the investigation all sorts of family dysfunction is unveiled, even within Wexford's own family. In fact damp dysfunction permeates. There is a wideranging cast of characters: fundamentalist wackos, an absent minded professor, a dope smoking granny, a female pedophile, a sexually precocious teen, etc. There are also a number of subplots, most interesting is that involving Wexford's daughter. The plot unfolds with just the right number of twists to keep one turning the pages.

Reading this was sort of like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers - a perfect way to unwind in the midst of the hectic holiday season.

I Sometimes Judge a Book By Its Cover

More book covers. I saw this World Changing bird one today and wanted to buy it based on the cover alone but resisted the temptation as I was in a directed shopping mode.

Via Kottke

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Dr. Azar Nafisi, having resigned as a professor of literature at the University of Tehran, gave private classes in her home to a group of seven hand picked female students. Reading Lolita in Tehran is her memoir of this post revolutionary period. They study Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austin. Iran at that time was a very difficult place for women who had been raised in a progressive secular society to exist. The works they read were forbidden by the regime; the books were applied, almost like a poultice, to the wounded areas of the group's psyche. Nafisi provides a portal into the lives of ordinary middle class Iranian women. She is a gifted teacher who relates literary characters to the political and this a very special book group but somehow I found the book intriguing rather than enthralling. I thought that the real life fundamentalists were superficially drawn and that the book was not particularly well-written. It satisfied some curiosity I had about the lives of women in Iran but, to be frank, I was glad to finish it and it won't remain on my bookshelves but will be placed in my literary recycling box.

Bookslut's Best Book Covers 2006

Can you judge a book by its cover? If so these must be great works.

Yipee! A new punctuation mark!

The INTERROBANG: A twentieth century punctuation mark.
The INTERROBANG has been described as "an obscure punctuation mark." The purpose of this page is to move the INTERROBANG from the obscure to the ubiquitous.

Via Grow a Brain

McEwan Unfairly Accused?

LONDON—A basic indignation underlies colleagues' letters of support for Ian McEwan, who has been accused of plagiarizing from a historical memoir in his novel Atonement. If he can be charged with lifting someone else's work on the basis of scant evidence, the other authors declare, then what about them?
The letters — from heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith and Martin Amis — were published yesterday in The Daily Telegraph, along with a report on how the campaign had arisen in defence of McEwan. Most of the writers said they were very familiar with what McEwan had done, having done the same thing themselves.

Art of Diagramming Sentences

Kitty Burns Florey explores a lost art in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, subtitled "The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences." Once used to teach grammar, the practice has fallen out of favor. Florey talks with Scott Simon about the book.

When I was in elementary school we spent a lot of time diagramming sentences and parsing and I excelled at it. I still remember this (unflattering) little rhyme:

Marilyn, Marilyn, common noun
Parse her up, parse her down
Neuter gender, hopeless case, object of a monkey's face

Via

Library Thing Unsuggester

Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.

What Kind of Reader Are You?

I'm sneaking quizzes in on this blog now, hoping no one will notice. How addicted is that?

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Via Folderol