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POPSNational Novel Writing Month (2009) What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time. Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together. Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work. When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
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POPSA Precious Gift for Lovers of Literature
The Paris Review Interview Archive "Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world. In tandem with this publishing project, we offer here online a complete index of every interview ever published, searchable by author and by date—as well as a substantial sampling of the archive’s finest interviews, posted in their entirety. Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inqui
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POPSIntelligence and good taste is more common than thought... Who would have bet against pessimistic culture pundits complaining about the lack of "intelligent" entertainment? Yet, figures show that culture is still a crowd-puller and is growing. For my part, I am a metalhead. And have always been an avid reader of contemporary literature as well.
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POPSFreedom From Speech ~ Editorial The U.N. is no stranger to assaults on decency and common sense. Indeed, the new ban on religious defamation is essentially a restatement of a measure approved by the General Assembly last year but barely noticed at the time. What makes this year’s resolution different, and more dangerous, is that it is supposed to move on from the General Assembly to another forum, where it might acquire real teeth: the second World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled to convene next April in Geneva. Many legal scholars believe that the decisions of international conferences of this sort can be incorporated into international law, putting them under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Individual nations could not be forced to amend their laws, but they might find Interpol knocking at their doors, serving them extradition requests to hand over their cartoonists and novelists.
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POPSSynesthetes - people who hear colors, see flavors ... "For people of a poetic bent, this is quite useful: You get to tell your date that her eyes glow like the moon, hair ripples like the ocean and skin is smoother than a friendly corporate takeover. (Fine, I'm not a poet.) But life wasn't always so romantic. The arts are a latter-day human characteristic, one that requires a certain amount of security and stability to flourish. So how did it develop? To help our ancestors climb trees, said Ramachandran. Doing so requires a vision-informed mental map of the branches before us, as well as a touch-informed mental map of our limbs' positions. Somehow these have to correlate. Which is quite a trick, when you think about it."
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POPSA New Era for Kurdish Literature This sounds like a very interesting novel that explores the conflicting interests of politicians and novelists. The author, Bakhtyar Ali, hopes that this novel will herald the end of the subordination of Kurdish writers to politicians. I hope this novel will soon be translated into English and thereby gain a wider readership.
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POPSHistory of History Great NYer article I'd clipped recently and so was glad to be able to clip the online version too!
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POPSThumbs Up? "The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando."
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POPSGod-Drunk vs. Godless From the Atlantic Monthly's article "The American Idea" - Scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and others look ahead to the future of the American idea. I thought the juxtaposition of these two pieces in particular was interesting. Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). Tim LaHaye is a minister and the author of more than 50 books, including the best-selling Left Behind series. I have clipped both pieces below because Atlantic Monthly won't let you view the entire article.
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POPSHas the Screen Killed American Novel? Very interesting article. It goes into more depth at the site than I could clip. I don't thin it is as bad as all this though. I see plenty of people reading. Public transportation is filled with people reading books and bookstores and sites like Amazon still do a great business in books. What I notice is this study only seems to include fiction prose, not poetry or non-fiction. If those were added in, the numbers would probably be higher. That's not to say that tv hasn't become the dominant form of education in most American households. Television's hold on people is quite powerful. But teh book isn't dead yet.
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