To get with the loving and giving, we start off with two bits of good news for folks on the autism spectrum.
First, a little Guardians of the Galaxy anecdote about how much of a difference it can make to have someone in a story to identify with.
And then, the first comic book hero explicitly written as a person with autism.
And now, to the book loving and suggestion giving. Here is a list of lists of links to lists of books!
If you’re easily upset by controversy, you might want to skip today’s literary links!
Author Bettina Stangneth has taken on the iconic view of Adolf Eichmann in Hannah Arendt‘s classic biography of the Nazi war criminal, from which we inherit the concept of the “banality of evil.” Stangneth’s new book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, demonstrates that he was fully aware of his role in organizing the Holocaust.
Some of you may have heard of Patrick McLaw, the Maryland middle-school teacher suspended from his job and spirited away by police to a psychological evaluation because he published a sci-fi novel about a school shooting 900 years in the future. Well, as it turns out, there’s a bit more to the story and McLaw is now claiming his detainment is more about misinterpreting his model-building hobby and a letter he had written than about his fiction.
If your kids love crayons, you still might not want to get them the latest offering from Really Big Coloring Books: a terrorism-themed series that has been recently updated to included information about the Islamic State and depictions of crucifixions.
And, if your kids are addicted to video games, you might want to keep quiet about the new Minecraft guidebooks, which are thriving on gamers’ obsession with the game.
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Style guide: Texts, performances, and periodicals (including websites) are italicized. Key persons are in bold.
Today is the anniversary of the first flying of the US flag, in 1777 during the Revolutionary War battle at Cooch’s Ridge. And this is a star-spangled day of links, highlighting both America’s own literary culture and America as a magnet for writers and writing from around the world.
To get us started, Electric Lit has a great infographic on America’s libraries.
Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff, in a tour-de-force of metafiction, emailed pages from the Bret Easton Ellis masterpiece American Psycho to each other through gmail and collected the sidebar ads that Google’s algorithm chose after scanning the text. The results are … well, psycho.
Al Jazeera America tells us about a Pittsburgh refuge for foreign writers who have faced persecution in their home countries.
Finally, Sal Robinson at Melville House examines what makes a translation sell.
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Style guide: Texts, performances, and periodicals (including websites) are italicized. Key persons are in bold.
Are you guys digging the new poem theme? It’s getting a lot of hits!
“Thursday’s child has far to go…” What exactly does the poem mean by this? It’s mysterious. But, I’ve tried to put together some “far to go” lit and entertainment links to match the theme.
(I’ll be traveling to St. Louis Wednesday, so I’m prepping this edition Tuesday evening.)
According to the poem, “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.”
Today’s sample of stories fits the bill.
I have argued elsewhere that a book is essentially
its text. The format, the presentation? A secondary consideration.
However, with the central role music plays in On the Head of a Pin, and the care I took with the cover, I have to admit that there’s really more to it than the text. I’m very much an idea person, but I understand that imagery and sound play a role, even if the sound is only the sound of the words as you merely imagine them while reading silently.
In that vein, Continue reading
You’ve gotta love a writing advice piece that drops the first of Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words in the first sentence!
And, it’s debunking what I think is a myth, that you shouldn’t edit while writing. Double win!
Take a look at Electric Literature’s explanation of why you really should ignore those who tell you to “puke up a draft then polish, polish, polish.”
I belong to a growing faction of writers (including my friends Les Edgerton and John Austin) who feel that publishing and literature are suffering an awful delusion: that anyone can be a writer. This myth is driven partly by an overly liberal, “everybody gets a gold star” desire to avoid negativity and offense (even when warranted) and partly by a cynical marketing strategy aimed at turning aspiring authors into an consumer base.
As usual, it’s the uneasy alliance between licentious Babylon and the exploitative Beast. And, it’s utterly unsustainable.*
Tori Telfer throws her hat in the ring with us at Bustle.com, explaining that “Creative Writing Isn’t for Everyone, And That’s Just Fine.”
Help us spread the word, and save publishing and literature in the process.
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* For more on my take, see the Pyramid Dynamics in Publishing and Authorhood of All Readers sections of my Biz pages.
I’ve said it before: the writing community is in danger of succumbing to fatal pyramid dynamics, and partly due to the ease of online publishing.
The Onion is now having a joke at the massive fountain of online content: “Study: Online Content Creators Outnumber Consumers 2,000 To 1.”
Funny, but also with a kernel of shake-my-head truth.
If you were surprised at my take on the nature of literature in “Evolutionary psychology and the do’s and dont’s of writing archetypes,” the far-more-popular literature website The Millions recently published a good survey of evolutionary literary theory: “On the Origin of Novels? Encountering Literary Darwinism.”
First let me get this out of the way…
