BBC 500 Words Story Competition

From The Oxford Owl:

As part of an ongoing programme of language research, the department of Children’s Dictionaries & Children’s Language Data at Oxford University Press has analysed children’s creative writing submitted to the BBC 500 WORDS story competition in 2023 and the results are out today!

Key Findings from the Report

• Themes around contemporary conflicts feature more prominently in the stories than in previous years.
• There is a shift away from the topic of Brexit, with very few mentions of this word (and none in a political context).
• There is a substantial increase in the frequency of AI in the stories – often in relation to a dangerous entity that could take over the world.
• The stories indicate an increasing awareness of neurodiversity, and conditions are often portrayed as a strength.
• Barbie occurs twice as frequently in stories from 2023 than 2020.
• TikTok is seen as a more established app and part of everyday life in 2023.
• Lioness(es) increased in frequency compared with 2020, and over half of the mentions were in reference to football. In 2020, almost all mentions of lioness(es) were references to the animal.
• The 2023 stories are the first to demonstrate a lived experience of Covid in the UK, and the pandemic is evidently still a reference point for children.

Insights from the 2023 stories

• The proportion of boys and girls who submitted a story in 2023 was 39% and 61%respectively. Excluding names, words that are used much more frequently by boys than girls include: Madrid, titan, league, Godzilla and champions. Meanwhile, words that are used much more frequently by girls than boys include: gymnastics, pony, foal, makeup and tiara.
• Words that appear much more often in stories from the 5-7 age category than the 8-11 age category include: mammy, baddy and teddybear. Meanwhile, words that are used much more frequently in stories by children in the older age group than the younger age group include intrigue, commander and murder. Adverbs, including practically, seemingly and sincerely, are also used more frequently in this age group.
• Words which had much higher frequency in stories from 2023 than 2020 include seasonal trends such as pumpkin and Halloween, footballers such as Haaland and Raya, and animals such as capybara and axolotl. Camilla is also used much more often in stories from 2023 – both in reference to the Queen and as a general character name.
• Meanwhile, words which had much higher frequency in stories from 2020 than 2023 include ps4, bushfire, trump, Brexit and coronavirus

Link to the rest at The Oxford Owl

John Blake rebrands true crime author Christopher Berry-Dee for new readership

From The Bookseller:

Bonnier Books UK imprint John Blake is rebranding true-crime author Christopher Berry-Dee for a new readership.  The publisher said: “True crime has evolved into a new generation of Millennial and Gen-Z podcasters, TikTokkers and influencers, with #truecrime reaching 1.4 million hits on Instagram and 732,000 on TikTok. The rebrand will reach this existing and already engaged audience, updating Christopher Berry-Dee for a new readership.” Executive editor at John Blake, Toby Buchan said: “Seven years on from our last redesign of Christopher Berry-Dee’s Talking with. . . series of true-crime bestsellers, and having just published his 12th book in the series, it seemed the perfect time to modernise the cover designs to suit today’s knowledgeable and enthusiastic readership. He is about to deliver his latest, Talking with Serial Killers: Murderous Medics, which John Blake will publish in January 2025. Christopher is a much-valued author, and given the size and keenness of the audience, we are only too glad to add extra zip to a body of work that is both wide-ranging and highly regarded.”

. . . .

Art director Nick Stearn said of Jake Cook, the designer who headed the redesign: “Jake’s fresh look at pushing the boundaries of CBD’s true crime series has resulted in a stand-out colourful repackaging which can’t help but catch your eye and draw you in to discover the sinister truths.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Stories about the Dongbei rust belt are resonant in China

From The Economist:

IT DOES NOT sound like an easy place to live. Scorched cars litter a desolate landscape. The city’s factories are struggling; workers are being laid off in droves. Worst of all, a serial killer is sowing terror.

“Moses on the Plain”, a novella of 2016 by Shuang Xuetao, offers an unsparing portrait of life in China’s industrial north-east in the 1990s. It inspired a film adaptation in 2021 and a television series in 2023. (It has also been translated into English in a collection called “Rouge Street”.) In its various formats, the story is part of a phenomenon called the “Dongbeirenaissance”. Dongbeiis a collective term for China’s rust belt: the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. The region, once known in the West as Manchuria, has become a byword for urban decay. Yet precisely because of that, it is pushing to the forefront of Chinese popular culture.

The provinces were once the country’s main manufacturing hub. In the 1950s a third of China’s biggest industrial projects originated there; workers enjoyed job security and good wages. But in the 1980s economic reforms broke the region’s monopoly on production; state-run outfits downsized to make way for private firms. Mass redundancies followed in the 1990s. In 2001 8.3% of the north-east’s labour force was unemployed.

Many Dongbeistorytellers witnessed these ruptures firsthand. Mr Shuang, Ban Yu and Zheng Zhi, the genre’s most prominent novelists, all grew up in Liaoning and have chosen disaffected workers as protagonists. Their stories focus on hardscrabble lives shaped by crime, poverty and unrest. Mr Zheng has adapted one of his own novels about the murder of teenage girls into a television series, “Nobody Knows” (2022). Last year “The Long Season”, a drama about a murder case, was hugely popular. “The fascinating part of the story,” said one reviewer on Douban, a website, is “the destiny of factories and the north-east.”

The trend echoes the rise of Hollywood noir in the mid-20th century, which evoked Americans’ anxieties in the wake of the Great Depression. As Kevin Grant, a film historian, has noted, the genre was characterised by its “misanthropic ethos and strong sense of fatalism; persistent motifs including entrapment and inescapability, treachery and retribution”.

Dongbeifiction also articulates wider concerns about the social and economic malaise that millions of Chinese are experiencing. Characters are listless; some find solace in the bottle. Family relations are strained. In this way, the stories also share themes with “Hillbilly Elegy”, a memoir of growing up in a depressed steel town in Ohio by J.D. Vance, who elegised his way into the US Senate.

Stories about the Dongbei rust belt are resonant in China.

. . . .

Recently a bookshop in Quanzhou, in the south-eastern province of Fujian, hosted an event dedicated to the genre. “We hope to use reading to battle forgetting,” the flyers read. For many Chinese, the things depicted in the pages of books are not distant memories but vivid and realistic.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Piracy in Italy: Study Shows Book Industry Losing €705 Million Annually

From Publishing Perspectives:

s the plans and programming for Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s (October 16 to 20) Guest of Honor Italy are being prepared, the chance to include book piracy as an internationally persistent challenge may well be worth organizers’ consideration.

When the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) commissioned the market research firm Ipsos to study piracy’s presence and impact on the book market, the results indicated that the cost of piracy is higher than a quarter of the market’s overall valuation, or 28 percent.

This, in fact, the third Ipsos study AIE has commissioned, and the organization this time has learned that as many as 4,900 jobs are being lost to piracy.

  • Thirty-one percent of the general Italian population older than 15 reportedly is using books, ebooks, and audiobooks illegally.
  • Much higher levels are being reported for students and professionals, who were tracked at 78 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
  • Some 70 percent of respondents who said they used illegally obtained publishing products also said that they don’t think they’re likely to be punished for it.
  • Nearly 300,000 acts of piracy are committed daily in Italy, according to Ipsos’ study, a figure that’s actually down eight percent from 2021
  • In economic terms overall, the loss to the country’s system is estimated to be some €1.75 billion (US$1.9 billion), with €298 million in lost tax revenue (US$326 million).
  • In a single year, the rep0rt says, there may be as many as 108.4 million acts of piracy committed in Italy.

As in the previous two studies commissioned by AIE in 2019 and 2021, researchers say it seems that many members of the public are ignorant about the seriousness of piracy and the consequences. There are observers in other parts of the publishing world, however, who say they remain skeptical of this, as consumer populations become increasingly media-savvy.

However authentic the claim of being unaware of the illegality of piracy from one consumer to another, the new Italian report indicates that things may be going the wrong direction: The percentage of those who have told Ipsos researchers that they are aware of the illegality of piracy is 79 percent in 2023—as compared to 84 percent in 2019.

AIE president Innocenzo Cipolletta during the course of the presentation clarified that he doesn’t see even the mild rollback on attitudes about piracy as real progress: “Italian publishing,” he said, “is experiencing a difficult economic context, characterized by rising costs that are only minimally offset by cover-price increases, while the demand stimuli present in past years are no longer present or have been scaled back.

“In this framework, the loss of a quarter of the potential value of sales because of piracy is an unsustainable cost that has repercussions on the number of companies that can no longer keep going; on employment; and on authors’ compensation.

“In 2023 we see the first signs of a reduction in acts of piracy, but there are many factors that can influence this, and I’d not yet speak of it as an established trend.

“Institutions and law enforcement have done a lot in recent years, and these data should spur us all to do even more and even better. We also consider stimulating public awareness to be fundamental: the number of people who consider this phenomenon to be not very serious is confirmed to be high, and in any case they say they are certain that the perpetrators will not be punished.”

. . . .

And the president of the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers, Andrea Riffeser Monti, pointed at the vendors and purveyors of pirated intellectual property, especially those online.

“Piracy of intellectual works is a central issue for the entire content publishing industry,” he said. “An ongoing economic and technological evolution today represents the most complex challenge for the authorities engaged in countering piracy.

“It must be made impossible for those who do business on illegal content to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet: people must be aware that they are committing an offence and must know that they can be punished for it.

“The phenomenon of digital piracy contributes to the growing and general impoverishment of publishing companies, but there are also risks for readers who, in the absence of quality information content, will be increasingly exposed to fake news and disinformation online.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG wonders if the Italian ebook market includes the equivalent of the 99-cent ebook or Prime Reading.

Museums have a hoarding problem

From The Economist:

BENEATH THE gothic main hall of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a labyrinth of curiosities. Only a tiny fraction of the museum’s collection is on display—around 40,000 objects out of some 80m. Much is consigned to the dim, crowded basement. Here is a tortoise once owned by Charles Darwin; there are hundreds of jars of giant fish and thousands of rare shells.

“We’ve outgrown this space,” says Clare Valentine, head of NHM’s life-sciences collection. (In addition to the basement, the NHM also relies on storerooms in undisclosed sites.) Many museums have a hoarding problem. The British Museum exhibits just 1% of its treasures; the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, only 0.007%. In storage treasures are usually protected, but the old vaults are dangerously full.

One solution is to move house. The NHM is undertaking the world’s biggest relocation of a collection, as 28m objects are shifted to a new centre in Reading. If you think packing up crockery and old photographs is tricky, imagine moving taxidermy: the bears, giraffes and lions require fibreglass moulds to protect their fur, as well as bespoke wooden frames. On arrival, they will be frozen for three days before being transferred into pristine, sanitised rooms. Ms Valentine reckons the whole move will take seven years.

The British Museum has already shifted some of its large sculptures and mosaics to a new storage centre, also in Reading. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum and Ashmolean Museum have been ferrying objects to fresh buildings, too. In France curators at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris are grumbling over a plan to move their collection to Dijon. Across the Atlantic, the MIT Museum is in the final stages of shifting 1.5m objects.

Moving may be stressful, but it can also afford the chance to rediscover, reassess and reorganise possessions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York admitted that its curator of Islamic art had never seen its collection of Persian rugs because they are trapped at the back of a storeroom.

And if no one knows what items are there, it can take a while to notice if some go missing. Last year it was revealed that a light-fingered curator had stolen up to 2,000 objects from the British Museum and sold some of them on eBay. Wales’s seven national museums are missing 2,000 artefacts; the Imperial War Museum in London more than 500.

Some institutions might never miss the odd coin or pottery fragment. Catalogues of goods are outdated and incomplete even at the most august museums. Teams employed to fill inventories are dwindling: the number of staff at the NHM has almost doubled in the past 50 years, but the proportion caring for and researching collections has dropped from 55% to 15%. With the current staff, the NHM reckons it would take 172 years to catalogue everything. But a new team, brought in for the move, will create a detailed database to register the relocated objects.

Modern buildings will shrink to-do lists in other ways. At one museum in Britain, a curator spends half their time checking that objects have not been infested with bugs. New facilities, by comparison, are climate-controlled and have quarantine zones to protect artifacts from pests.

Link to the rest at The Economist

A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

From The New Yorker:

When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly chronicled both ends of her long life in a series of nine memoirs. The first of these, “Instead of a Letter,” was published in 1963 and recently rereleased in the U.S. as part of the NYRB Classics series; it recounts her jolly, upper-class English childhood on the family estate of Ditchingham, in Norfolk. The last book that she wrote, “Alive, Alive Oh!,” came together in her “darling little room” at the Mary Feilding Guild, in Highgate, London, a garden-set home for the elderly; it’s a high-spirited, recalcitrant account of “waiting to die” at ninety-six.

Athill was the sort of character who ought to have seen her obituaries before she went. First, because she would have bewitchingly written off any high praise—the New York Times noted “her luminous prose, gimlet social acuity and ability to convey a profound sense of place”—with her brand of droll humor. (She refused burial at the Highgate Cemetery because of the cost: “I think being dead is an expensive business.”) And, second, because she would have enjoyed the evidence of how much her reputation had emerged; she’d worked behind the scenes for meagre wages and little adulation as one of the century’s great editors. In 1952, she became a co-founding director of the publishing house André Deutsch, and, until her retirement, in 1992, shepherded the likes of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Jean Rhys to publication. Athill wrote seven of her memoirs after leaving her nine-to-five, but, until that relatively late turn toward autobiographical mania, she knew her place. “We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own,” she writes, in “Stet: An Editor’s Life.” We might not have known her had she not brought forth her own romping and exuberant litter.

Critics frequently used the terms “frank” or “candid” to describe Athill’s memoirs. But Athill doesn’t write as if no one is watching; she writes as if she’d never even imagined someone might watch, and therefore doesn’t have a scruple to hold on to. To describe honesty as her hallmark isn’t quite enough: that’s the least we can ask of our memoirists. What she is marvellous at is admitting, sans self-recrimination. In the early twenty-first century, the memoir has turned into a confessional, in a nearly religious sense. Writers go there to seek redemption, and to chart their evolution from naïve to knowing: no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis. Athill doesn’t treat her foibles and losses—of love, of money, of caste, of certainty—as traumas, events that would define her life as troubled and scarring. Instead, she makes the case that being kicked out of Eden is good for the soul.

“I am glad that I have not inherited money or possessions,” Athill writes, striking a defiant note in “Instead of a Letter.” Inheritance was never her due, though as a child she once counted the bodies that stood between her and the palatial Ditchingham estate. “It appeared that at least twelve people, seven of them my contemporaries, would have to die before I would have a claim, and I hardly thought I ought to pray for this however much I would have liked to.” Ditchingham belonged to her mother’s parents, who offered it out as the extended family’s seasonal home, where they spent long summers and holidays throughout her early life. The thousand-acre estate with a twenty-bedroom, fully staffed house granted the family security in their Englishness, as members of an élite and unquestionable class. Athill stresses that the experience of growing up with such surety turned Ditchingham into a cocoon, a secure location from which to launch a life, but also a place she would inevitably leave. “There I used to be,” she opines, “as snug and as smug as anyone.” From an early age, she knew that adulthood would exist elsewhere.

Athill’s joy in Ditchingham, the children’s after-tea appearance in front of the grownups in the drawing room and the horsemen wandering across the fields, is the bright marrow of her writing: it suffuses her later life, and her prose, with bubbling, fresh oxygen. But, in “Instead of a Letter,” she writes as if she’s relieved that she got away from the estate and its inhabitants. “Like anyone else they had their charms,” she writes of her family, but “physically, intellectually, and morally, they were no more than middling.” Yet they thought themselves superior beings: “Smugness is too small a word for what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like moral and aesthetic rightness; from inside, it is people like me, who question it, who look stupid, ugly, and pitiful.”

Hence her happiness that she didn’t inherit: staying on at Ditchingham for a lifetime might have trapped her in the same small, closed life. Her childhood remained blissful to her as she aged because it lived on in her memory but didn’t define her future. “Never to have broken through its smothering folds would have been, I have always thought, extremely depressing,” she writes. “But on the other hand, not to have enjoyed a childhood wrapped warmly in those folds—that would be a sad loss.” Cousins were saddled with managing the finances of an upkeep-heavy country pile, whereas she, the oldest child of a fourth daughter, absorbed the bliss of the place but not the narrowness.

Ditchingham wasn’t the only inheritance that Athill would forgo. At thirteen, her mother told her that they’d “lost” their money, but what she meant was that they’d spent it all. “My parents felt they were living austerely because we ourselves looked after our ponies and they had not kept on their own hunters,” Athill writes, dryly. She recounts her mother telling her that “the really bloody thing about being poor is that if you leave something on the floor when you go out, you know that it will still be there when you get back.” Along with her two younger siblings, the family had been living in a well-staffed, six-bedroom house in Hertfordshire since her father had retired from the Army. Financially, they fell out a window but landed on a mattress—Athill’s grandparents rented them Manor Farm, a house on the estate, for cheap. A governess cost too much, so Athill was sent to Runton, a girls’ boarding school on the North Sea, and then up to St. Mary’s College at Oxford, in 1936.

When Athill was twenty-two, her future disintegrated again. She’d been engaged for two years when her fiancé, a Royal Air Force pilot named Tony Irvine, was deployed to Egypt. Then his letters suddenly stopped. She discovered in rapid succession that he’d married someone else while abroad and then been killed in action. “A long, flat unhappiness” set in, her sense of her own value collapsed, and her twenties were filled with broken-off relationships with incompatible men. “By the time I had reached my thirties,” she writes, toward the end of “Instead of a Letter,” “I was convinced that I lacked some vital quality necessary to inspire love.” At age ninety-nine, she explained in an interview, “there was a basic, underlying sense of failure—and it came from the very simple thing of having been brought up expecting to get married.”

“How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. Typical culprits are poverty or abandonment, sometimes a remarkable, indelible catastrophe. Cheryl Strayed’s mother died when Strayed, the author of “Wild,” was in college: she calls it her “genesis story.” Dani Shapiro, the author of five memoirs, starts her autobiographical path in “Slow Motion” with the story of her parents’ tragic car accident. Even Joan Didion reached new heights of cultural resonance with “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her memoir of the year following her husband’s death. The modern memoir is the proving ground for our national obsession with trauma, a place to gawk at whoever comes through the emotional meat grinder with the good sense and talent to finesse their damage into a redemption song.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

Ditchingham Hall. (2022, April 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditchingham_Hall. Photographer – Stephen Richards, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0)

Is everything you assumed about the Middle Ages wrong?

From The Economist:

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly filth.” This useful bit of advice for young courtiers in the early 13th century appears in “The Book of the Civilised Man”, a poem by Daniel of Beccles. It is the first English guide to manners.

Ian Mortimer, a historian, argues that this and other popular works of advice that began appearing around the same time represent something important: a growing sense of social self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-control. Why then? Probably because of the revival of glass mirrors in the 12th century, which had disappeared from Europe after the fall of Rome. The mirror made it possible for men and women to see themselves as others did. It confirmed their individuality and inspired a greater sense of autonomy and potential. By 1500 mirrors were cheap, and their impact had spread through society.

Mr Mortimer sets out to show that the medieval period, from 1000 to 1600, is profoundly misunderstood. It was not a backward and unchanging time marked by violence, ignorance and superstition. Instead, huge steps in social and economic progress were made, and the foundations of the modern world were laid.

The misapprehension came about because people’s notion of progress is so bound up with scientific and technological developments that came later, particularly with the industrial and digital revolutions. The author recounts one claim he has heard: that a contemporary schoolchild (armed with her iPhone) knows more about the world than did the greatest scientist of the 16th century.

Never mind that astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo knew much more about the stars than most children do today. Could a modern architect (without his computer) build a stone spire like Lincoln Cathedral’s, which is 160 metres (525 feet) tall and was completed by 1311? Between 1000 and 1300 the height of the London skyline quintupled, whereas between 1300 and the completion of the 72-storey Shard in 2010, it only doubled. Inventions, including gunpowder, the magnetic compass and the printing press, all found their way from China to transform war, navigation and literacy.

This led to many “expanding horizons” for Europeans. Travel was one. In the 11th century no European had any idea what lay to the east of Jerusalem or south of the Sahara. By 1600 there had been several circumnavigations of the globe.

Law and order was another frontier. Thanks to the arrival of paper from China in the 12th century and the advent of the printing press in the 1430s, document-creation and record-keeping, which are fundamental to administration, surged. Between 1000 and 1600 the number of words written and printed in England went from about 1m a year to around 100bn. In England, a centralised legal and criminal-justice system evolved rapidly from the 12th century. Violent deaths declined from around 23 per 100,000 in the 1300s to seven per 100,000 in the late 16th century.

Link to the rest at The Economist

The adultification of YA

From The Bookseller:

This year marks my sixth anniversary of becoming a bookseller. I started off at Waterstones in Newcastle, and moved to work for the bound in Whitley Bay just after the pandemic. I read a little of everything, from niche horror novels to the latest bestsellers. But what really galvanised me as a bookseller – and led to my own writing career – was the YA section.

Books for teens are incredibly important. As a step between the younger titles and more mature novels, YA is an invaluable place to explore new, mature topics in a safe, approachable way. Kate Weston, as an example, talks about period poverty, feminism and systemic misogyny – incredibly important topics for readers coming to terms with those topics for potentially the first time – while still writing fun stories about teenage girls and their friends, who are about the same age as my own YA Book Club members: between about 12 to 15.

When I attended YALC last year, I was eager to find some new titles I could add to 2024’s reading list for my club members. However, as I was feverishly picking up proofs, pin badges and tote bags in that very specific YALC hysteria, it suddenly hit me that I was seeing a lot of books marketed towards me – a reader in her mid-30s. But not much for my Book Club. Everywhere I looked, I saw merchandise for titles such as Fourth Wing and Sarah J Maas, and new titles that were looking to scratch that same itch: namely, romantasy with more than a dash of ‘spice’.

A recent article in The Millions states that more than half of readers buying YA books are older than 18. Which can be amazing. Heartstopper’s popularity with adults, for example, points to a desire to read Queer stories that adult readers may not have had access to in their own teens. And many of the authors writing in that sphere are incredible. Holly Jackson, Adiba Jaigirdar, Sophie Gonzales and many more write fantastic YA fiction that adults can pick up and enjoy.

. . . .

But recently the YA genre seems to be ever more focused on those readers specifically. The marketing has had a very definite shift; so many books filled with ‘spice’ have cute cartoon covers that look identical to wholesome teen romances, making shelving tricky for the uninitiated. Social media does not help. I had a horrifying instance of a 10-year-old bringing A Court of Thorns and Roses to the till in the same pile as the new Jacqueline Wilson because they’d seen it on BookTok.

There are also far more books in the YA section itself that are romantic in nature than not. This is understandable – publishing is a business, trends will be followed. But I feel that chasing more mature audiences and themes is to the detriment of teens who are not ready for, or just plain do not want, intense passion in their fiction.

At Book Club last year, we read a fantasy book that I thought was swoony enough to be fun without being weird for a group of teenagers to discuss with an adult. It includes some flirting, a few heated looks, and builds up to a passionate kiss before the couple are interrupted for the climactic battle. What surprised me was that even this level of romance made some members uncomfortable – and since then we’ve had a few instances of ‘the kissing’ being a mark against a book we’ve discussed. This leaves me diving into a publisher’s backlist, looking for titles before the recent romantasy boom that would engage my readers that, crucially, they haven’t read already.

I often wonder if this is a case of overexposure – that romance that was once fine, or even sought out, is now leaving young readers cold because of the constant pushing of romantasy and ‘spicy’ stories. The idea of the brilliant, enthusiastic kids I know being pushed out of their own genre just because they don’t want to read about sex makes me more than a little sad.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

The EU’s Digital Services Act goes into effect today

From The Verge:

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has officially gone into effect. Starting on August 25th, 2023, tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more must comply with sweeping legislation that holds online platforms legally accountable for the content posted to them.

. . . .

What is the Digital Services Act?

The overarching goal of the DSA is to foster safer online environments. Under the new rules, online platforms must implement ways to prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content while simultaneously giving users the means to report this type of content.

Additionally, the DSA bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children. It also requires online platforms to provide more transparency on how their algorithms work.

The DSA carves out additional rules for what it considers “very large online platforms,” forcing them to give users the right to opt out of recommendation systems and profiling, share key data with researchers and authorities, cooperate with crisis response requirements, and perform external and independent auditing.

Which online platforms are affected?

The EU considers very large online platforms (or very large online search engines) as those with over 45 million monthly users in the EU. So far, the EU has designed 19 platforms and search engines that fall into that category, including the following:

  • Alibaba AliExpress
  • Amazon Store
  • Apple App Store
  • Booking.com
  • Facebook
  • Google Play
  • Google Maps
  • Google Shopping
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Snapchat
  • TikTok
  • Twitter
  • Wikipedia
  • YouTube
  • Zalando
  • Bing
  • Google Search

The EU will require each of these platforms to update their user numbers at least every six months. If a platform has less than 45 million monthly users for an entire year, they’ll be removed from the list.

What are online platforms doing to comply?

Many of these companies have already outlined the ways in which they’re going to comply with the DSA. Here’s a brief overview of the most notable ones.

Google

While Google says it already complies with some of the policies envisioned by the DSA, including the ability to give YouTube creators to appeal video removals and restrictions, Google announced that it’s expanding its Ads Transparency Center to meet the requirements outlined by the legislation.

The company also committed to expanding data access to researchers to provide more information about “how Google Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play and Shopping work in practice.” It will also improve its transparency reporting and analyze potential “risks of illegal content dissemination, or risks to fundamental rights, public health or civic discourse.”

Meta

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is working to expand its Ad Library, which currently compiles the ads shown on its platforms. The company will soon start displaying and archiving all the ads that target users in the EU while also including the parameters used to target the ads, as well as who was served the ad.

In June, Meta released a lengthy report about how its algorithm works across Facebook and Instagram as part of its push toward transparency. It will also start allowing European users to view content chronologically on Reels, Stories, and Search on both Facebook and Instagram — without being subject to its personalization engine.

TikTok

Similar to the measures Meta is rolling out, TikTok has also announced that it’s making its algorithm optional for users in the EU. When the algorithm is disabled, users will see videos from “both the places where they live and around the world” in their For You and Live feeds instead of videos based on personal interests.

It will also enable users to view content chronologically on their Following and Friends feeds. TikTok is making some changes to its advertising policies as well. For European users aged 13 to 17, TikTok will stop showing personalized ads based on their activity in the app.

Link to the rest at The Verge

How to write the perfect plot twist: Anthony Horowitz’s 5 top tips

From Penguin UK:

It’s fair to say that Anthony Horowitz knows his way around a killer plotline. The bestselling author has not only captured readers with his mystery novels, Magpie MurdersMoonflower Murders and the Hawthorne mysteries, but taken on the mantle of his predecessors with two acclaimed Sherlock Holmes novels – The House of Silk and Moriarity – and three James Bond novels. So when he agreed to offer a masterclass in writing the perfect plot twist, we knew we were getting one of the best. 

It’s definitely worth watching The Art of: The Murder Mystery in full to get the depth of Horowitz’s wisdom, as well as stories about how he wrote his fantastic novels. But here are five nuggety takeaways to keep by your writing table (perhaps, like Horowitz, you eschew the keyboard for a fountain pen?) in the midst of your murder mystery-writing. 

1. Don’t underestimate the planning

Horowitz acknowledges that some writers like to sit down and let the story flow out, but he’s not one of them. “I often spend longer planning a book than I do writing it,” he says. “A good example is Magpie Murders, which took me something like 10 years to work out and then about two years to write, but it was a very, very complicated book and required an enormous amount of thinking.

“I put everything down on paper. I make copious pages and pages of notes until I am ready to write and by the time I do sit down at my desk, I have a sort of a map of where I’m going and everything is going to work.” Make sure, though, that you leave a little room to surprise yourself when you get to the page: “If I can’t surprise myself, how can I surprise my reader?”

2. Start with a simple formula

Not sure how that plan should begin? There’s a Horowitz Hack for that: “Start with a simple formula,” he advises. “A plus B equals C. A equals one person, B is another person, C is the reason why A murders B. That’s your bullseye. If that’s original and interesting and surprising enough, then you can tell us who A and B are, and and that’s your next ring.” Once you’ve got the basics, he explains, you can build out into the worlds your characters occupy, who knows them and how they know each other.”  

3. People should be able to guess the twist

Want to know the secret of a killer plot twist? It should be obvious enough for people to potentially guess it – but surprising enough that they rarely actually do. One of the major influences on Horowitz’s work was Agatha Christie, an author who he says always surprises him but “you always feel you could have guessed because all the information has been down there in front of you. When I’m writing my book, I’m very influenced by that. When my publisher or my agent or anybody else reads one of my books, the first question I ask is not ‘Did you enjoy it?’ but, ‘Did you guess it?’ Because that, to me, is the crux of the matter. If they do guess it, I feel a sense of disappointment but at the same time, if they can’t get it, then I haven’t played fair. What I prefer to do is for them to say, ‘No, I didn’t get it, but I should have.’ That’s what I’m aiming for.” 

4. Live inside your book

The best way to bring a story to life? Inhabit it. “There’s one piece of advice I would give to writers: don’t stand on the edge of the book, looking over the edge of the chasm. Live inside the book looking around you,” Horowitz says. “What my characters see, I see. What they feel – the wind or the sunshine – I feel. If I’m inside the book, I’m not thinking about it as being something that you or anybody else will read. I am merely inside the world of the book – all that comes later.” 

5. The only rule is originality

Link to the rest at Penguin UK and thanks to NC for the tip.

Cheers in Czechia for the End of VAT on Books

From Publishing Perspectives:

Czech book industry representatives say they hope that after a challenging 2022, the introduction of a zero-percent value-added tax rate (VAT) on books could provide much-needed support to the country’s publishers and booksellers.

During 2022, the country’s book sales dropped to about 8.4 billion koruna (US$359.5 million), down around 3 percent year-over-year. That worrying data was released in the latest market report by the Prague-based Czech Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Association (SČKN).

. . . .

Local publishing houses expect that this year’s tax cut on books could improve the situation in their market.

In a message on its home page, the association says, “On January 1, 2024, the approved adjustment of VAT on books came into effect. As of this date, books are exempt from VAT. To put it simply, the VAT rate for books is reduced from 10 percent to zero percent.

“We believe that this enlightened step by legislators—we’re finally at the forefront this time in Europe—will ultimately lead to an increase in the quality of reading in the Czech Republic, the development of Czech book culture, and accessibility for readers.

. . . .

Grada’s position, Sviták says, is that digital sales have the potential to serve as a pillar of the publisher’s growth in the coming years.

“We’re committed to continuously improving Bookport,” he says, “our online subscription service for unlimited reading, both in terms of book selection and user experience. We plan to continue improving our digital content offerings and digital services for customers, as well as raising the efficiency of our internal processes through digitization. We’re exploring for ways to expand our product range to include a broader portfolio.”

In addition to this, Sviták says he’s researching the potential of using artificial intelligence in its activities, while remaining “cautious about the negative impact of AI on the book market and copyrights.”

Asked about the potential impact of the reduced VAT rate on book sales in Czechia, Sviták says he expects the tax cut “will help us get back on track for growth and help stabilize the Czech book market as a whole. We can continue to publish a wide spectrum of books from fiction that people enjoy, along with personal-development content, and professional books for specific smaller target groups.

“Certainly, this move will positively influence both the Czech book market and Grada Publishing. It will benefit Czech readers and enrich the cultural landscape. Without this, there’d likely be a significant decline in the number and diversity of published books across the book market, especially in non-mainstream titles that often contribute greatly to societal diversity and enrichment.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Pakistan

Creator: Jeremy Weate CC BY 2.0 DEED no changes

Wikimedia Commons

From The Economist:

The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan. By Abubakar Siddique. Hurst; 299 pages; $48.50 and £35

This is a thoroughly readable account of the Pashtuns, Pakistan’s second-largest ethnic group, which is settled on both sides of the border with Afghanistan. Abubakar Siddique is a Pashtun who has covered his fellow tribespeople for years for Radio Free Europe. Much of his work has focused on the Pashtuns’ tragic entanglement with Islamist militancy. The Taliban and its various offshoots on both sides of the border are an almost exclusively Pashtun movement. Militancy began after the British split the Pashtuns’ historic lands between India and Afghanistan, triggering numerous “frontier jihads”. After independence Pakistan backed Pashtun Islamists against nationalists who dreamed of creating a united Pashtunistan. Pakistan’s government in Islamabad also sponsored Islamist rebellions against the government in Kabul and, during Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, directed American resources to the most extreme Pashtun fundamentalists. This helped dislodge the Russians but radicalised and militarised many Pashtuns. More than a million have died since 1979 in wars involving Russia, American-led forces and other Afghans. Support for Islamists also backfired on Pakistan. Even though Pakistan helped the Afghan Taliban seize power from an American-backed government in 2021, the Taliban refuse to do Pakistan’s bidding. The Pakistani Taliban—an offshoot—have repeatedly turned their guns on Pakistan itself.

A Case of Exploding MangoesBy Mohammed Hanif. Knopf; 336 pages; $16.95. Vintage; £9.99

Perhaps because it is such a troubled place, Pakistan produces fabulous art. “Joyland”, a film from 2022 about a man who falls in love with a transgender dancer, was rightly praised. The paintings of Salman Toor sell for more than $1m. The country also has many fine authors writing in English, including Mohammed Hanif. His debut novel, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”, is a satire about the death of Zia ul Haq, the military dictator who seized power in 1977 and was largely responsible for Pakistan’s Islamisation. The book imagines the events leading up to the explosion of his plane on August 17th 1988 through a series of darkly comic episodes. Many of Mr Hanif’s characters want the pious and paranoid general dead. A bomb in a consignment of mangoes (Pakistan’s national fruit) is just one of the weapons that would-be assassins consider. The cruelty and absurdity of Zia’s rule is captured by the story of a blind woman who is gang-raped, then stoned for committing adultery. Mr Hanif trained to become an air-force pilot during the Zia era. One of Zia’s would-be assassins is also a trainee pilot. The sequences set in the Pakistan Air Force Academy are worthy of Joseph Heller.

Travels in a Dervish Cloak: Adventures in Pakistan. By Isambard Wilkinson. Eland Publishing; 324 pages; £16.99

For all its maddening problems, Pakistan is a beguiling place. Isambard Wilkinson identifies much of what it is that captivates. He was the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in Pakistan (and also wrote for The Economist) at a tumultuous time, covering the fall of Musharraf, the Taliban takeover of the Swat valley and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. But these great events are secondary to his search for “the quiddity of Pakistan”. It helps that he fell in love with the place as a teenager, when he accompanied his grandmother, a Raj-era Anglo-Indian, on visits to see her old friend, a grande dame of Lahore known as “the Begum”. A beautiful writer, Mr Wilkinson paints a warm and generous picture of a diverse country of tribal chiefs and mountain valleys still populated by pagan tribes. But the problems are never far away. The Sufi shrines that he regards as the “pulses of Old Pakistan” are blown up by jihadis who hate tolerant, syncretic strains of Islam. Mr Wilkinson’s warnings that the “Heath Robinson contraption” of the Pakistani state could fall apart are all the more powerful coming from such an admirer of the country.

Link to the rest at The Economist

8 Stories About Cultural Alienation and the Search for Belonging

From Electric Lit:

Cultural alienation is the feeling of being disconnected or estranged from one’s own culture or the culture in which one lives. While these stories traverse continents and cultures painting vivid portraits of characters grappling with displacement, loss, and the yearning to belong, each is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. From navigating societal pressures to confronting historical wounds, generational trauma, or their own identity, these characters defy obstacles and forge their own paths to connection, self-discovery and acceptance.

In my novel The Things We Didn’t Know, I portray the journey of Andrea, a young girl from Puerto Rico who moves to the United States. Andrea struggles to reconcile expectations coming from the diverse circles that shape our lives, ranging from school to the dynamics of a traditional Hispanic family living in the midst of an American community. Andrea walks an emotional tightrope—never feeling quite rooted, always adapting to ever-shifting social landscapes. These conflicts are not confined solely to the realm of cultural disparities. They resonate universally with anyone grappling with the displacement that requires us to form multiple layers of identity.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is a compelling odyssey portraying the experience of Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who migrates to the United States in pursuit of education and opportunities. Through her blogging, she addresses pressing issues such as cultural appropriation and the new set of racial dynamics she confronts. But when she returns to Nigeria, Ifemelu feels Americanized and questions her Nigerian identity. As Ifemelu navigates her own sense of self, Adichie offers a striking commentary on the struggles faced by immigrants, the complex nature of personal identity and the evolving landscape of race in today’s interconnected world.

Adichie explores the psychological and emotional burdens that come with alienation while confronting the persistent challenges posed by social expectations. Adichie’s narrative invites readers to reflect on the burden imposed by migration on the individual. This story is a testament to the quest for belonging in more than one place.

. . . .

The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa

Armando Lucas Correa’s The Night Travelers weaves together the intricate lives of its characters across time and continents, exploring the theme of overcoming generational alienation. The narrative unfolds with Ally’s clandestine interracial romance with Marcus in 1931 Berlin, amid the looming dangers of Nazi ideology. As Ally protects Lilith, her biracial daughter, the novel transforms the fear imposed by a hostile, racist society into a heartfelt narrative of motherhood and survival.

Decades later in Havana, Cuba, Lilith, who escaped Germany as the daughter of a Jewish couple, grapples with the loss of her mother and the shadows of her German heritage. This portrayal of her now even more complex identity accentuates the persistent challenges of alienation. The novel’s trajectory unfolds further when her daughter Nadine reveals a web of familial secrets in New York. Nadine’s journey becomes an example of breaking free from generational trauma and offers a glimmer of hope for future generations through education and self-identification.

. . . .

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

In Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, the delicate balance of beauty and heartache unfolds through the narrative of a seven-year-old girl, Claire Limyè Lanmè, who is aware that her father is trying to give her away. The story explores the alienation experienced by Claire until her disappearance, as her father seeks a better life for his daughter, after his wife’s death.

Danticat’s prose paints a beautiful shimmering coastal setting in Haiti in contrast to the vast distances that separate individuals within a community, capturing both the beauty of the landscape and the profound loneliness that can exist, even in a close-knit community. The novel portrays alienation as both an individual and collective reality and emphasizes the characters’ shared sense of being adrift in search of belonging in a country devastated by poverty and loss.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

1 in 4 Books Sold in France Are Comics

From Book Riot:

While we primarily focus on stateside bookish news, we thought some recent news on France’s reading habits was pretty interesting. According to the data from market research company GfK, 1 in 4 books sold in the country are comics.

France’s affection for comics isn’t a recent thing — it is the home of immensely popular comics like Asterix and The Adventures of Tintin, after all — but comics did get a boost because of a couple recent things. For one, the onset of the pandemic saw that more people stayed home, allowing for more reading time.

There was also a measure implemented recently called the Culture Pass. With it, French teens were allotted €300 ($367) to spend on things like museum trips, instruments, and yes, comics.

Still, publishing industry people like Marie Parisot, the marketing and commercial director of Dargaud, didn’t think the increased interest would last this long, “We didn’t expect this phenomenon after lockdown was lifted. Everyone was worried people would stay at home, turned in on themselves.”

Comics’ enduring popularity in France can be attributed to a number of things, like the country’s vast number of independent bookstores (which equals the number in the US and the UK combined).

Link to the rest at Book Riot

Vivendi to divide group and put divisions, including Hachette, on stock market

From The Bookseller:

Vivendi has announced that it will carve up its group into four separate entities which will be listed on the stock market.

This follows its recent takeover of Lagardère, owner of Hachette Livre, France’s largest book publisher, and is prompted by the need to “fully unleash the development potential of all its activities”, the group said in a statement. Until now, it has suffered from a “significantly high conglomerate discount”, which has reduced its value and hampered its subsidiaries’ ability to acquire other companies, it added.

Book publishing will be bundled together with media, entertainment and distribution, which includes Hachette, the Prisma Media magazine publisher and retail outlets in railway stations and airports. The three other entities will be the Canal + pay TV network, the Havas communications firm, and an investment company to look after all the group’s assets in culture, media and entertainment.

Lagardère is the world’s third largest general public and educational book publisher, and a “leading global player in travel retail”, with its chain of shops under Relay and other brands, the statement said. It is present in 40 countries and has more than 27,000 employees.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

The First Time I’ve Had a Book Censored

From Publishing Perspectives:

The move made by the French government against the novel Bien trop peitit (Far Too Small) in July 2023─that book being part of the 15-title Collection L’Ardeur─marked a rare decision in France. Not only was the government’s decree troubling for the national publishing community but it also had the unintended effect of helping to give the book new visibility in the marketplace.

Éditions Thierry Magnier is part of the Actes Sud publishing group, and Manu Causee’s novel Bien trop petit (Far Too Small) was published in September 2022 as part of the collection, described as mildly erotic literature for a young and informed audience. When released, the book was rated for ages 15 and 0lder. This was listed on the back cover, and the book was not a major success in bookstores until nine months later─when its sales were boosted by the controversy of interior minister Gérald Darmanin’s action.

Here is how the publisher’s sales text is written to describe the Collection L’Ardeur, literature neither considered nor intended by Éditions Magnier as pornography:

Readdarefantasy─three words that sum up the ambition of the L’Ardeur collection. Since its beginnings, our house has been proud to defend courageous literature which is interested in adolescence as it is, with its gray areas, its excesses, its heightened emotions. But adolescence is also a period when the body metamorphoses, where sexual life begins. What could be more logical, then, than to open our catalog to texts which speak of sexuality, desire, fantasy?

L’Ardeur resolutely places itself on the side of pleasure and the free and multiple exploration that our bodies offer us.”

Publisher Magnier uses the term traumatic when he describes the experience of having the book censored last summer.

“This is the first time I’ve had a book censored,” he says.

The Collection L’Ardeur, Magnier says, “was created for teenagers as a counterpoint to what emerged few years ago around ‘dark fiction.’ In France and abroad, ‘dark fiction’ was literature like Fifty Shades of Grey, in which women are objectified and men are stereotyped as rich with nice cars, and so on.

“We wanted to bring erotic literature to young people, without being educational, and to tell a different story from those you see on the Young Adult shelves,” Magnier says. And in the title that’s become so controversial, it’s youthful male sexuality that’s at issue.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Japanese laureate deals fatal blow to notion that AI will never write as well as a human

From The New Publishing Standard:

Music to my ears. A book part-written by AI has won a prestigious literary award. A fatal blow to the AI Resistance, but also a whole load of trouble for lawmakers and AI regulators who thought they had the topic nailed.

Since long before ChatGPT made AI a public amenity back in November 2022, authors, publishers and other creatives have been saying, with all the certainty that comes with not having a clue what they are talking about, that AI will never be able to replicate human creativity and quality.

Those of us who witnessed and understood the significance of the Kasparov vs Deep Blue chess tournament in the mid-1990s, have just been counting the days for them to be proven wrong. That day has come. But first some background.

When first Gary Kasparov beat IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996 in Philadelphia, mankind breathed a collective sigh of relief. With five years still to go until 2001, the spectre of HAL2000 had been relegated to the movie reel of history.

That is, until the following year in New York, when the notion that a machine could never beat a human was blown out of the water in the 1997 New York City rematch when, in possibly the most exciting spectacle of human achievement since man landed on the Moon, Deep Blue trounced Kasparov. The greatest chess player the world had ever seen had been defeated by a machine.

A machine, of course, created by humans, just as the modern-day chatbots have been created by humans.

Those who misunderstand chess will say it was a calculations game and Kasparov was simply outnumbered, but a good chess game is an art, a thing of infinite beauty.

And the day Kasparov symbolically knocked over his king after just nineteen moves (Nineteen! This was a massacre!) was the day AI came of age. Everything since then has just been a prelude to ChatGPT and its many successors.

And in our hearts we all knew that, whether we understood chess or not. Which is why, when the Luddite Camp blandly asserts AI can never equal human creative quality, they in the same breath can be guaranteed to rant about how AI will take our creatives’ jobs.

This week, news came from Japan that dismantled the two competing Luddite arguments simultaneously.

Rie Kudan, winner of the biannual Akutagawa Prize, said to be Japan’s most prestigious literary award, was about ten when Gary Kasparov let mankind down, so may or may not have known about Deep Blue. but she certainly knew about modern AI.

Earlier this week, Kudan collected the Akutagawa Prize for her novel, “Tokyo-to Dojo-to”, a novel with AI themes, that was lauded by a judge for being “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable.

Savour those words. A judge for the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, a country that has produced three Nobel laureates, a Booker prize winner and a Man Booker International Prize winner, said Kudan’s work was “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable.”

Let’s hope the judge was not one of those Luddites that had been asserting AI could never match human creativity, because Kudan has now revealed she used ChatGPT to develop the book.

I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book,” Kudan said, adding, “I would say about five percent of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI.

Music to my ears. Egg on the faces of everyone who has blandly said AI can not match human quality.

At the time of this post going live, there is no word about how this revelation will affect the copyright of the book in Japan, but the fact that it is part AI-written raises questions about this book being translated and published in other countries where copyright law may not offer full protection.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

Price discrimination key to combatting book price stagnation, says Enders

From The Bookseller:

Book pricing has stagnated over the past two decades, leading to severe real-term declines in price per book, according to analysis by Enders.

The report, which uses Nielsen BookScan data as well analysis by a team of Enders researchers, says “nominal prices are now on the rise, but they are still swamped by inflation, and there is no prospect of them catching up to where they were”. It continues: “The cost to produce books has been hit by many of the same inflationary conditions affecting companies (and people) across the board, leading to tough conditions at publishers, particularly small ones.”

However, in brighter news, “books offer many ways for publishers to price discriminate, charging more to price-insensitive, motivated readers”, it said.

Enders described a “cost crisis” for many publishers due to two decades of “eroding real prices” for trade books. When seen in the context of an increasingly competitive market for people’s attention, with free or low-priced entertainment and information options, books are also limited by how much prices can go up.

But prices need to rise, according to Enders. There is little slack in the cost structure of publishers as staff and author pay is already generally low, but it proposes price discrimination based on sales channel, format and special editions as a way forward. “This would enable publishers to get a better average price, while still leaving squeezed and price-sensitive readers with low-cost options,” Enders said.

Nominal average selling prices have risen from £7.81 in 2001 to £8.97 up to October 2023, but this represents a sizeable fall in real terms as that £7.81 is equivalent (in October 2023) to £13.80.

Noting the power of BookTok and subscription book boxes as “powerful new tastemakers”, Enders suggests special editions are another way of price discriminating to “capture higher spend from more motivated readers within certain genres”.

It said: “At the highest end, book subscription boxes like FairyLoot and Illumicrate work with publishers to create special editions with all the trimmings: custom covers, foils, sprayed edges, limited signed/numbered/lettered editions. Some contain exclusive extra content, and the boxes come with themed merchandise. These are designed for genre superfans who will post images or video on Instagram and TikTok. The books themselves retail to non-subscribers for upwards of £20, with some super special editions on offer for up to £75, and they do not get discounted. Many (though by no means all) of the books also retain or increase their value on secondary markets.”

Enders noted how Waterstones and independent bookshops offer retailer exclusive editions with higher specs or additional content, which are usually not such collectors’ items, but support higher prices and avoid the trap of discounting.

Enders said “diversification of online physical retail should be a priority for the industry, as it prevents one buyer (Amazon) from having too much power to dictate terms over suppliers, and shape the market in its own interests”.

It continued: “For publishers, diversification of sales channels is also an opportunity to dissolve some of the pricing issues, as they can price-discriminate by selectively discounting based on where readers are buying. A buyer on a TikTok shop may be coming directly from a video about the title they’re buying, making them less price-sensitive.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Lawrence of Arabia Review: Dreams of Empire

From The Wall Street Journal:

The British explorer Ranulph Fiennes is the first person to have crossed Antarctica on foot and the only living person to have circumnavigated the planet by its poles. In 2000 he fell through the ice while walking solo to the North Pole, leaving the fingertips of his left hand severely frostbitten. When he got home, Mr. Fiennes, a veteran of the elite Special Air Service, trimmed the fingertips with a saw, saving himself £6,000 in medical expenses and, he says, considerable pain.

In 2003 Mr. Fiennes had a heart attack and a bypass operation, then completed seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. In 2009 he reached the summit of Mount Everest on the third attempt. His other feats of endurance include writing more than 30 books, including biographies of the polar pioneers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, handbooks for ultrarunners and travelers with weak hearts, and the perhaps inevitable family history “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

Mr. Fiennes (pronounced “Fines”) is a classic English type, the diffident hero and driven adventurer. He is the square peg who inspires irregular soldiers in inhospitable places. He crosses deserts, forests and frozen wastes, facing down danger and the limits of human endurance, death included.

The rarest such figure, combining all these characteristics of imperial legend with lasting historical significance, was T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935). Dubbed Lawrence of Arabia in his lifetime and immortalized twice over, once by himself in his 1926 memoir “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and again by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lawrence played a crucial but thwarted role in the shaping of the modern Middle East.

In 1916 Britain was at war with Germany’s Ottoman Turkish allies. Lawrence, an archaeologist turned intelligence officer, helped organize the Arab tribes of the Hejaz (today’s western Saudi Arabia) into a guerrilla army and led the Arab Revolt that, in October 1918, displaced the Turks from Damascus. The revolt raised hopes for a unified, self-determining Arab nation, but Lawrence’s political masters and their French allies connived at frustrating that ambition. After the war, the British and French took over from the Turks and created new borders and nations. The events of that era still complicate today’s local and global politics.

Mr. Fiennes’s “Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T.E. Lawrence” is a casually elegant biography and an expert reflection on the kind of irregular warfare that Lawrence pioneered and Mr. Fiennes experienced as a young officer fighting a Marxist insurgency in the mountains of Oman in the late 1960s. Lawrence’s example, Mr. Fiennes writes, preceded him and “often inspired me to victory in life-or-death situations.” But Lawrence was also his companion in facing “impossible military and political odds, as well as confronting personal scars.”

The second of five sons, Lawrence grew up in a villa in Oxford. Fascinated by military history, especially the Crusades and Napoleon Bonaparte, he was pushed by his mother to achieve greatness. Lawrence’s motives in risking his life, Mr. Fiennes writes, were not just “his attachment to the Arabs and his hatred for the Ottomans.” He was not who he claimed to be or who he wanted to be. “Lawrence” was an assumed name. His father, an Irish baronet named Thomas Chapman, had eloped with the family maid. When Chapman’s wife refused to grant a divorce, he and his mistress adopted a new name and pretended to be married. Lawrence’s mother saddled him with the “burden that he was special” and a mission to “redeem the family.” Raised a strict Christian, Lawrence was 10 years old when he discovered his illegitimacy.

He became a feted student at Oxford, then cultivated the English romance with tribal life while digging at ancient Carchemish, north of Aleppo, Syria, from 1911 to 1914. “I am Arab in habits and slip in talking from English to French to Arabic unnoticing,” he wrote home. When war broke out in 1914, the British army needed Arabic speakers with local knowledge. Lawrence’s old Oxford tutor, now an intelligence officer, summoned him to Cairo as a mapmaker and adviser. But Lawrence already had a plan to redraw the map by unifying the Arab tribes against the Turks. “I want to pull them all together,” he wrote in 1915, “and roll up Syria by way of the Hedjaz” in the name of Hussein Ibn Ali, the Emir of Mecca.

Meanwhile Hussein and his four sons secretly planned their own revolt, but needed weapons and support. The British could not spare soldiers, but they sent Hussein money and antique rifles, as well as a promise from Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, to recognize Hussein’s rule from Aleppo to Aden if the revolt succeeded.

In July 1916, Hussein’s followers expelled the Turkish garrison from Mecca but, lacking heavy weapons, they were repulsed at the ports of Jidda, Yenbo and Rabegh. In October, with the revolt stalled and British confidence faltering, Lawrence sailed from Egypt for Jidda. From there, he disguised himself in Arab robes, crossed roughly 100 miles of desert by camel through sandstorms, bearing the heat and weeping saddle sores, met Hussein’s son Feisal at the rebel camp and launched his legend.

Lawrence said he preferred “the Arab untouched” to the “perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanized Arab.” In Feisal he found his ideal partner, tall and white-robed, with a “strange still watchfulness” and an “almost regal” bearing that reminded Lawrence of Richard the Lionheart and the young Napoleon. Returning to Cairo, Lawrence secured explosives, the support of Royal Navy ships and British advisers “to train Arab bands,” and a supply of gold.

The Turks controlled the Red Sea ports of the Hejaz via their new Damascus-Medina railroad. Lawrence soon saw that the Arabs could not match well-drilled Turkish troops and their German-supplied artillery. Inland, however, Lawrence believed that the tribesmen’s mobility, small numbers and familiarity with “one of the most trying countries in the world for civilized warfare” made them “the most elusive enemy an army ever had.” Lawrence convinced Feisal to adopt an indirect strategy: disrupt and pin down the Turks by sabotaging the railroad line, then bypass and isolate the Turkish garrisons at Medina and the Red Sea ports and push northward to Syria.

In November 1917, Ottoman troops captured Lawrence, disguised as a peasant, as he spied out the railroad junction of Deraa. He was brutally beaten and raped by the Turkish governor and his men. The shame he felt after that episode was only multiplied at the end of the war: After he entered Damascus on Oct. 1, 1918, in a Rolls Royce, he had to watch as the British commander Edmund Allenby informed Feisal that Britain and France did not intend to honor McMahon’s promises of a unified Arab kingdom.

Damaged by his experiences in Arabia and disenchanted by the political aftermath, Lawrence became a celebrity when “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” appeared in 1926, then did his best to disappear, enlisting in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. He died in a motorbike accident in 1935.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Lawrence is in the second row on the right below

In Tbilisi: Bookseller Tamara Megrelishvili on Sales Trends

From Publishing Perspectives:

Tamara Megrelishvili is the founding managing director of Prospero’s Books and Coffeehouse on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, a central avenue named for the 11th-century Georgian poet. Megrelishvili says that book sales at the moment are going better than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that consumers’ visits to the physical store are picking up again after having been driven online during the coronavirus’ onslaught.

Nevertheless, she says, the kind of government impositions on freedom of expression are causing her to hold off on making some international book orders in a market that traditionally reads quite readily beyond its own borders.

The buzz that Prospero’s Books puts out about itself is that it has the largest international selection in bookselling in the Caucasus region.

. . . .

Megrelishvili’s store is certainly prominent among Georgia’s book retailers, which are logically concentrated in urban areas and particularly the capital. Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s 2018 guest of honor market of some 3.7 million people focused five years ago at the trade show on its unique alphabet and its literature’s function as a cultural bond both before and after Soviet rule. In bookstores today, this is reflected in shelves of well-known Georgian writers such as Aleko Shugladze and Giorgi Kekelidze, alongside  many titles from the international market.

. . . .

In a conversation with Publishing Perspectives, Megrelishvili says that despite generally good growth rates in Georgian book publishing and what she describes as a rising interest in reading, she doesn’t expect to see significant market growth in the new year.

One of the reasons she anticipates a flat market is a slowdown in tourism to Georgia.

After the announcement of the Russian mobilization for Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, as many as 100,000 Russians entered Georgia, according to published figures attributed to the Georgian ministry of internal affairs, with some 222,250 or more in September 2022 alone. This has led, Megrelishvili says, to a growth in book sales and also to an increased share, of course, of imported Russian-language books in her market.

Following the initial rush, however, many of these displaced consumers have moved to other parts of Europe and elsewhere, creating, she says, a need for a new impetus for growth in sales of books in Georgia.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

The problems of American and British booksellers pale in comparison to those caused by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Russian troops.

The Dutch solution to busyness that captivated the world

From The BBC:

Niksen – a Dutch wellness trend that means “doing nothing” – has caught the attention of the world as a way to manage stress or recover from burnout.

The Hague, where I live, has 11km of gorgeous coastline with rolling dunes and sandy beaches. In summer, I often see locals in Scheveningen or Kijkduin (the city’s most famous beaches) sunbathing, strolling in nature or riding their bikes, then sitting down on one of the many benches available. Sometimes, they’re reading or chatting with their friends, but just as often, they’re engaging in niksen.

Niksen is a Dutch wellness trend that means “doing nothing”. It first caught the attention of the world in 2019 as a way to manage stress or recover from burnout. At the time, many people were complaining about exhaustion and depression caused by overwork and were looking for solutions – which is why concepts such as Japanese ikigai or Danish hyggealso entered the English lexicon. As a linguist myself, I loved the idea that you could express the whole concept of doing nothing in one short and easy-to-pronounce word.

In my book Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, I define it as “doing nothing without a purpose” – so not scrolling on Facebook or engaging in meditation. Whereas mindfulness is about being present in the moment, niksen is more about carving out time to just be, letting your mind wander wherever it wants to go. And as we’re slowly recovering after the pandemic, it’s important to rethink the way we work and spend our time.

Linguistically, niksen (doing nothing) is a verb created from “niks“, which means “nothing”.

“It fits with the tendency of the Dutch language to create verbs out of nouns. From from ‘voetbal’ (football) to voetballen (playing football), from ‘internet’ to internetten, from ‘whatsapp‘ to whatsappen etc. I think this is something that happens in Dutch in particular,” said Monique Flecken, a psycholinguist at the University of Amsterdam, who researches how the languages we speak affect the way we see the world. Essentially, it’s much less work to say “niksen” instead of “to do nothing”. “The Dutch are a practical, direct people and their language reflects that,” she said.

Link to the rest at BBC

The nightmare before Christmas

From The Bookseller:

Last week I spoke at a local secondary school about bookselling and running a small business. One of the questions asked was “What’s the hardest part of owning a business?” “Fear of failure,” I said. What I didn’t say was that, at the moment, things are scary.

We’ve led a fairly charmed life for the five years we’ve been in operation. Even the period during Covid-19 proved successful, once we made it through the first lockdown with sanity just about intact. When our children could go back to nursery in June of 2020, and we could open the shop doors for click and collect, takings rocketed. Everyone who could was working from home, which gave our residential location a huge advantage, and Waterstones was closed. It was this period that gave us the capital to move and expand our Bristol shop and open a second store in Portishead.

Last autumn these moves were paying off. This autumn has been another story. Costs are up, takings are down and the Christmas sales uptick only arrived in December, six weeks later than normal. For the first time since we opened in 2018, nerves are, if not frayed, feeling a little worn.

The cold comfort is that we’re not the only ones. Seeing the stories on Facebook from other bookshops, and hearing reports from the various sales reps that visit us, times are tough for everyone. Other sectors are also feeling the pinch. I met a friend yesterday whose restaurant has grown and grown for the past decade (both in size and profit). As we had lunch he told me his takings are 28% down year-on-year!

As the interest rate hikes bite on people’s mortgage renewals, as food prices stay stubbornly high, as the cost of every activity and product has to increase to cover costs (or gauge prices in the case of some of the big brands), shopping habits are changing. People are buying less. Last year our customers may have bought a hardback as a gift, this year it’s a paperback. Last year they may have bought two or three books for one person, this year it’s just one.

. . . .

The increased prices of books haven’t helped. Non-fiction paperbacks have broken the £10 barrier. Big title fiction hardbacks are now £25, up from £20. I will happily argue that this is exceptional value for the lifetime of joy you’re getting, especially in comparison to the £4 coffee that lasts 30 minutes. But to those buying presents while watching their budgets, these price increases, even if just psychologically, are putting people off.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Copyright: Canadian Publishing Calls Out Ottawa’s Inaction

From Publishing Perspectives:

A bilingual coalition of Canadian publishing and associated organizations, including Access Copyright, today (November 30), is calling on Heritage minister Pascale St-Onge and innovation, science, and industry minister François-Philippe Champagne to meet with them urgently on the need to finally follow through on the government’s promise in the 2022 federal budget to ensure “that the Copyright Act protects all creators and copyright holders.”

As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, in August a larger roster of organizations, councils, associations, guilds, and federations—representing more than 50,000 publishers, writers, and visual artists—sent a single demand to St-Onge: fix the 2012 Canadian “Copyright Modernization Act,” which they say has been a CA$200 million disaster for the book business ($US147.3 million).

The apparent silence from the Canadian government now has been accentuated by what Access Copyright reports was a “tabling last week in the House of Commons of a report by the Standing Committee on Science and Research on Support for the Commercialization of Intellectual Property that recommended, among other things, ‘That the government of Canada undertake a review of the Copyright Act in order to study appropriate remuneration for Canadian content creators, particularly as it relates to educational material.’”

“Called to testify last spring as part of the study by the Standing Committee on Science and Research, Gilles Herman (Éditions du Septentrion), then vice-president of [Québec’s copyright collection agency] Copibec, rightly pointed out that in 2012, the legislature added several exceptions to the Copyright Act allowing circumvention of intellectual property, including introducing the concept of fair dealing for educational purposes, without specifying its scope of application.

“Since then, most Canadian educational institutions have disengaged from the collective licensing regime they had previously adhered to, resulting in financial losses of approximately $200 million in 10 years, directly attributable to this legislative gap. ‘If the Canadian government does not correct the copyright law, the risk is that the education sector of the future will no longer teach Canadian content because Canadian publishers will have simply disappeared,’ he affirmed.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Amsterdam’s Elsevier: Research and Real-World Impact

From Publishing Perspectives:

As we work to recoup some of the relevant material released to the news media near the end of our publication year, we look now at two significant research reports from Elsevier, one on research evaluation and the other on real-world impact—both increasingly pressing interests in the world of academic publication.

In the 30-page report “Back to Earth: Landing Real-World Impact in Research Evaluation,” the program carried out a survey of 400 academic leaders, funders, and researchers in seven countries about real-world impact as part of academic evaluation. Key findings include:

  • Sixty-six percent of respondents say academia has a moral responsibility to incorporate real-world impact into standard research evaluation​
  • Seventy percent say they are passionate about research that has a positive real-world impact
  • Fifty-three percent say a more holistic approach to evaluation would improve research cost-effectiveness.\
  • Fifty-one percent of respondents identified at least one serious problem with current methods of research evaluation
  • In terms of barriers to change, 56 percent of those surveyed said the “lack of common frameworks or methodologies” while 48 percent said “lack of consensus on what constitutes impact”

In this report, it’s interesting to note some of the differences, culture-to-culture in the question of how important it is for research “to aim for real-world impact.” Particularly in the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, there could hardly have been a time when it was so obvious, the need that the world-at-large has for the most sophisticated, committed, and efficient research.

Nevertheless, this graphic indicates that surveyed personnel on this point came in on the affirmative side (yes, research should aim for real-world impact) at rates up to 93 percent in the United Kingdom and a low of 64 percent in the Elsevier report’s home, the Netherlands.

Another very interesting point in this report compares the view of funders and those of researchers.

While funders surveyed seem to agree with researchers that more holistic approaches are important, the funders did say that they were more in agreement with the researchers that the current system creates vested interests.

And it’s the researchers who said they were more passionate than the funders about having “real-world impact as researchers and academic leaders.”

Topping the list of barriers offered by funders to a more holistic form of research assessment was lack of resources at 53 percent, on a 53-percent par with lack of consensus on what actually constitutes impact.

Also running heavily were the lack of a common framework or methodology in holistic method of assessing research’s impact, at 49 percent. But another tie came in next, with 38 percent each of respondents saying that two more barriers are “achieving sufficient alignment between different actors” and “complexity.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

How to Lose a Library

From Public Books:

LONDON. Michaelmas term nearly over. Implacable November weather predictably implacable. Forty-foot Megalosaurus presumably out there somewhere.

Readers may recognize a version here of the first lines of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Dickens wrote Bleak House in 1852 and 1853, publishing it in 20 serial parts. As one did back in the day, he wrote Bleak House scratchily, noisily, using a goose quill pen, dipped at intervals into iron-gall ink, on cotton-rag paper. The material stuff that it took to write a novel such as Bleak House was very different from the stuff that writers use today.

Should you wish to read Dickens’s Bleak House manuscript (it’s close to illegible—I’ve tried), you can. You will find it safely on deposit at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, bequeathed to the museum by the wife of Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster.  Most of Dickens’s manuscripts are safely housed in the Victoria and Albert. And as far as we know, the Bleak House manuscript is exactly where it belongs: snug in its archival box on a shelf, somewhere in or near the museum’s sprawling brick campus in South Kensington. Library staff diligently ensure that the air around that box remains at the right levels of humidity and temperature; that the room that houses the box remains secure; and that appropriate protocols govern how and where readers can have access to the work.

What’s business as usual at the Victoria and Albert Museum is far from the case fewer than four miles away, at the United Kingdom’s national public repository, the British Library. At the British Library, hopeful would-be readers of the library’s prodigious catalogue of unique, rare, and contemporary materials are out of luck.

On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. Moreover, the cyberattack also swept the personal data of the British Library’s humans—its users, but, far more extensively, its staff—into the hands of an outside party. During the final week of November, images of the stolen data were presented for auction on the dark web, for sale to whoever’s willing to pay 20 bitcoin, or about £600,000. By making the library’s digital infrastructure into a commodity (in an open, albeit dark, market), a “ransomware gang” calling itself Rhysida hopes to pressure the British Library to pay up first.

For good reason, this theft makes me wax existential: What did those cyberterrorists steal, when they stole the library’s entire digital footprint? What is a library, anyway?

. . . .

What could be more insistently analog than research on fragile pieces of paper, handwritten by authors in centuries long past?

I am writing this from desk 1086 in the British Library’s Manuscripts Room, on a Thursday in late November 2023. I arrived here this morning to continue work on a truly remarkable manuscript: Works and Days, the diary of the distinguished late-Victorian poet “Michael Field.” In this manuscript, you see, there’s an open secret: “Michael Field” is a pseudonym for two writers, both women, and also longtime lovers. My work is part of a larger effort to reframe what we think about Victorian life, writing, poetry, art, women, sexualities, and even dogs (for Michael Field were truly idiosyncratic), when we open the canon to such epistemological extravaganzas as those on display in this nearly 10,000-page double-diary.

Typically, this work is exhilarating to me; but today, it is uncanny, unsettling. I am the only reader present in what’s typically a bustling space. The library’s readings rooms are now zombies. As public service announcements have brightly reported, the rooms are still open for “personal study.” That said, visitors cannot request, retrieve, or use materials (for the most part), from the library’s vast collections.

Those collections are safe nearby. Yet as far as the digital world is concerned, they… do not exist.

What does exist is the stuff: the library’s collections themselves; the building and its desks, chairs, book cradles; even the odd cone-shaped paper cups at the public water fountains. Also here are the humans who conduct the operational tasks of this massive institution: the same humans whose personal data are splayed out on dark eBay for purchase, to be put to use in ways I shudder to imagine.

Not much circulation, retrieval, and return is happening at all; but still, the people who work at the library’s circulation desks, and on tasks involving the retrieval and return of books for readers, are here. They sit quietly. The security staff at the main entrance, and those at the doors of the various reading rooms, are here as well, and quiet as well. The locker room familiar to any regular library user is all but deserted, yellow and green metal doors ajar like so many flags on a windy day.

Here in the Manuscripts Room, the space itself looks the same, but it does not sound the same; depopulated, it is oddly quiet. Loudly quiet! This quiet is completely different from the constant rustle of ambient noise that counts as what we could call “library quiet.” Today, the distinctive energy of the Manuscripts Room is nowhere to be found: on a typical day, staff and readers alike are focused, on the clock, working swiftly and deeply, using fragile materials that are, by definition, unique and irreplaceable. This distinctive energy is the product of a thrilling alchemy of two forms of raw materials: readers, and the works in their hands.

Absent readers, absent works, the reading room is just a room. The ghosts of all the Christmases are stuck in storage.

. . . .

What could be more insistently analog than research on fragile pieces of paper, handwritten by authors in centuries long past?

I am writing this from desk 1086 in the British Library’s Manuscripts Room, on a Thursday in late November 2023. I arrived here this morning to continue work on a truly remarkable manuscript: Works and Days, the diary of the distinguished late-Victorian poet “Michael Field.” In this manuscript, you see, there’s an open secret: “Michael Field” is a pseudonym for two writers, both women, and also longtime lovers. My work is part of a larger effort to reframe what we think about Victorian life, writing, poetry, art, women, sexualities, and even dogs (for Michael Field were truly idiosyncratic), when we open the canon to such epistemological extravaganzas as those on display in this nearly 10,000-page double-diary.

Typically, this work is exhilarating to me; but today, it is uncanny, unsettling. I am the only reader present in what’s typically a bustling space. The library’s readings rooms are now zombies. As public service announcements have brightly reported, the rooms are still open for “personal study.” That said, visitors cannot request, retrieve, or use materials (for the most part), from the library’s vast collections.

Those collections are safe nearby. Yet as far as the digital world is concerned, they… do not exist.

What does exist is the stuff: the library’s collections themselves; the building and its desks, chairs, book cradles; even the odd cone-shaped paper cups at the public water fountains. Also here are the humans who conduct the operational tasks of this massive institution: the same humans whose personal data are splayed out on dark eBay for purchase, to be put to use in ways I shudder to imagine.

Not much circulation, retrieval, and return is happening at all; but still, the people who work at the library’s circulation desks, and on tasks involving the retrieval and return of books for readers, are here. They sit quietly. The security staff at the main entrance, and those at the doors of the various reading rooms, are here as well, and quiet as well. The locker room familiar to any regular library user is all but deserted, yellow and green metal doors ajar like so many flags on a windy day.

Here in the Manuscripts Room, the space itself looks the same, but it does not sound the same; depopulated, it is oddly quiet. Loudly quiet! This quiet is completely different from the constant rustle of ambient noise that counts as what we could call “library quiet.” Today, the distinctive energy of the Manuscripts Room is nowhere to be found: on a typical day, staff and readers alike are focused, on the clock, working swiftly and deeply, using fragile materials that are, by definition, unique and irreplaceable. This distinctive energy is the product of a thrilling alchemy of two forms of raw materials: readers, and the works in their hands.

Absent readers, absent works, the reading room is just a room. The ghosts of all the Christmases are stuck in storage.

Link to the rest at Public Books

Although PG hasn’t been in a physical library in several years, he shared the sadness of the author of the OP.

He can’t imagine how huge just the physical card catalog for the British Library must be.

He has a mental image of row upon row upon row of ancient and worn wooden cabinets, each with twenty rows of small card-sized drawers, each drawer with an ancient hand-written label like “dead – deaf” held in place by a tarnished medal frame with tiny ancient screws. The card cabinets stretch off into the distance with only a couple of patrons disturbing their their silent symmetry.

Requiescat

by Oscar Wilde, 1881

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

From Interesting Literature

‘Requiescat’ is from the Latin for ‘(may he or she) rest in peace.’ The poem was written for Wilde’s own sister. Isola Wilde was just nine years old when she died, while recovering from a fever, during a visit to Edgeworthstown Rectory, in Ireland. According to their mother, Lady Jane Wilde, the cause of Isola’s death was ‘a sudden effusion on the brain’.

John Anderson my Jo

by Robert Burns, 1789

From The Scottish Poetry Library:

John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first acquent;
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bony brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw;
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson my Jo.

John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill the gither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go;
And sleep the gither at the foot,
John Anderson my Jo.

Link to the rest at The Scottish Poetry Library

Sweeping Regulation of AI Advances in European Union Deal

From The Wall Street Journal:

European lawmakers reached a political deal on regulating artificial intelligence, marking a step toward establishing a comprehensive AI law in Western countries.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act would be the latest in a series of regulations the bloc has pushed forward that is expected to reverberate through the global tech industry and affect some of its biggest players. Earlier legislation from the EU set out new competition and online content rules that affect large U.S. tech companies including Meta Platforms, Apple and Google’s parent, Alphabet.

“The EU is the first in the world to set in place robust regulation on AI,” said Dragos Tudorache, a member of the European Parliament from Romania who was one of the body’s lead negotiators of the AI Act.

The deal agreed to by lawmakers includes bans on several AI applications, such as untargeted scraping of images to create facial-recognition databases, and sets rules for systems that lawmakers consider to be high-risk, according to a statement from the European Parliament. It also includes transparency rules for general-purpose AI systems and the models that power them.

Penalties for breaking the rules could reach up to 7% of a company’s global revenue, depending on the size of the company and the rule that was broken, according to the statement.

Europe’s AI Act was first proposed in 2021, before chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard were publicly launched. The introduction of those chatbots and the popularization of a range of other AI applications in recent years put new scrutiny on the legislation and prompted some lawmakers to seek to introduce new provisions.

One of the most controversial aspects of the European legislation was determining whether to set blanket rules for general-purpose AI and so-called foundation models, which are trained on vast data sets and underpin more-specialized AI applications. 

The AI Act will require those systems to follow a set of transparency rules that include complying with EU copyright law and creating detailed summaries about the content used to train AI models, according to the statement from the European Parliament. High-impact models that are deemed to create systemic risk will face tougher rules, including a requirement to assess and mitigate such as risk.

. . . .

The deal faced swift criticism from industry and consumer groups. DigitalEurope, a tech lobby group, said the new rules would be expensive for AI companies to comply with and risk putting Europe at a disadvantage. “The AI race is not one Europe can miss out on,” said Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, the group’s director-general.

. . . .

At The New York Times, Adam Satariano writes, “even as the law was hailed as a regulatory breakthrough, questions remained about how effective it would be.

“Many aspects of the policy were not expected to take effect for 12 to 24 months, a considerable length of time for AI development. And up until the last minute of negotiations, policymakers and countries were fighting over its language and how to balance the fostering of innovation with the need to safeguard against possible harm.”

So while an agreement has been reached, its precise outlines—and how firm they may be—remain to be examined and understood.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG says this is a mistake that will kill a great deal of AI research and development in the EU. He predicts that many bright AI researchers and developers will decide to head to employment opportunities outside of Europe.

If Scientists Were Angels


From The New Atlantis:

Francis Bacon is known, above all, for conceiving of a great and terrible human project: the conquest of nature for “the relief of man’s estate.” This project, still ongoing, has its champions. “If the point of philosophy is to change the world,” Peter Thiel posits, “Sir Francis Bacon may be the most successful philosopher ever.” But critics abound. Bacon stands accused of alienating human beings from nature, abandoning the wisdom of the ancients, degrading a philosophy dedicated to the contemplation of truth, and replacing it with something cruder, a science of power.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis goes so far as to compare Bacon to Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus:

You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants … but gold and guns and girls. “All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his command” and “a sound magician is a mighty god.” In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.

Lewis draws the final phrase of this critique from Bacon’s New Atlantis, the 1627 utopian novella from which this journal takes its name. But why would a publication like The New Atlantis, dedicated to the persistent questioning of science and technology, name itself after a philosopher’s utopian dreams about magicians on the verge of becoming mighty gods?

According to the journal’s self-description on page 2 of every print issue, this is not the whole story. Bacon’s book raises questions about the moral and political difficulties that accompany the technological powerhouse it depicts, even if it “offers no obvious answers.”

Perhaps it seduces more than it warns. But the tale also hints at some of the dilemmas that arise with the ability to remake and reconfigure the natural world: governing science, so that it might flourish freely without destroying or dehumanizing us, and understanding the effect of technology on human life, human aspiration, and the human good. To a great extent, we live in the world Bacon imagined, and now we must find a way to live well with both its burdens and its blessings. This very challenge, which now confronts our own society most forcefully, is the focus of this journal.

The fact is, people have been puzzling over Bacon’s uncanny utopia for four hundred years without being able to pin it down. The reason for this is simple: We’ve been reading it wrong. Bacon’s New Atlantis is not an image of things hoped for or of things to come. It is an instructive fable about what happens when human beings stumble across the boundary between things human and things divine, a story about fear, intimidation, and desire.

Human beings have always lusted after knowledge, specifically that knowledge which promises to open our eyes so that we might become like gods. Bacon did not invent or ignite this desire, but he did understand it better than most.

In form, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is modeled loosely on Thomas More’s Utopia. A ship full of European sailors lands on a previously unknown island in the Americas where they find a civilized society in many ways superior to their own. The narrator describes the customs and institutions of this society, which in Bacon is called “Bensalem,” Hebrew for “son of peace.” Sometimes Bacon echoes, sometimes improves upon, More’s earlier work. But at the end of the story, Bacon turns to focus solely on the most original feature of the island, an institution called Solomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Works.

This secretive society of natural philosophers seeks nothing less than “the effecting of all things possible,” as C. S. Lewis duly notes. Bacon devotes a quarter of the total text of New Atlantis to an unadorned account of the powers and insights the philosophers in Solomon’s House have. Then the work ends abruptly with no account of the sailors’ trip home or the results of their discovery. The story ends mid-paragraph, with a final line tacked on at the end: “The rest was not perfected.”

What is the meaning of this tale? The first and simplest answer was given by William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, who was responsible for publishing New Atlantis after Bacon’s death. He wrote in his preface to the work: “This fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men….” The founders of the Royal Society, Great Britain’s famous scientific academy, seem to have had a similar idea a few decades later: Bacon “had the true Imagination of the whole Extent of this Enterprise, as it is now set on foot.”

Link to the rest at The New Atlantis

Booker judge admits it’s nearly impossible to read ALL the books.

From Lit Hub:

In a refreshing “quiet part loud” moment earlier this fall, this year’s celebrity Booker judge, Peep Show’s Robert Webb, admitted publicly that it’s basically impossible to read the entire pre-longlist pool of 163 books in seven months. While that’s not exactly a novel-a-day, as Webb suggests, it’s pretty damn hard, particularly if you have a day job that has nothing to do with reading books.

Webb’s big mistake, of course, wasn’t that he didn’t finish every single novel, but that he admitted it. Most of us who read professionally can tell by the 50-page mark if we don’t like a book: the DNA of truly great writing is usually there in each sentence, each paragraph, and so we read on.

. . . .

It’s always been the case that the more you look behind the scenes of literary prizes the more arbitrary (and silly, frankly) the whole enterprise seems. If we’re being honest, the point isn’t to pick the ONE TRUE best novel (that’s not how art works) but rather to remind the broader public that novels exist, that they should be celebrated, and, while we’re at it, purchased in hardcover for $29.99.

Link to the rest at Lit Hub

PG suspects there are many different and more effective ways for selecting the Booker prizes than by inviting a group of traditional publishing insiders to read (or not read) the candidates and then vote according to the best interests of their publisher.

PG is not suggesting that such behavior would ever occur in the hallowed and dusty halls of major publishing.

Taking Pushkin off his pedestal

From Engelsberg Ideas:

On the evening of February 24, 2022, a few hours after Vladimir Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, thousands of Russians, most of them young, came out onto Pushkin Square in central Moscow. They stood around the statue of Alexander Pushkin, holding placards saying ‘No to War’ for a few minutes before their protest was dispersed by the police. By rallying next to the monument to the curly-haired poet, they were perpetuating a tradition dating back to Soviet times.

Five weeks later, Ukrainian forces recaptured the town of Chernihiv north of Kyiv, which had suffered grievously from a month of Russian occupation and where hundreds had died. A Russian air strike had killed 47 civilians, a war crime that Amnesty International termed ‘a merciless, indiscriminate attack’. On April 30 Ukrainian soldiers took down a bust of Pushkin which had stood in the centre of the liberated town since 1900 and removed it to the local museum.

Across Ukraine at least two dozen Pushkin statues have been removed from their pedestals since the war began. Ukrainians say they are dethroning a Russian imperialist. They cited one of Pushkin’s poems in particular, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia,’ a jingoistic text, in which he castigates Europeans for opposing the Russian army’s suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830. It wasn’t just Ukrainians. In early 2022, Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine, also invoked an imperial Pushkin, putting up placards with his portrait in towns they had captured, such as Kherson, where the poet had lived.

Many Russian liberals who opposed the war in Ukraine were aghast at such actions. Their Pushkin was the one who was sent to southern Ukraine as a political exile and who was, in the nineteenth century, called ‘the bard of freedom’. He was the man who had written ‘I lauded freedom in a cruel age,’ a line which is inscribed on the pedestal of his statue in Moscow.

The Ukraine war has sparked a debate about the relationship of Russia’s literature and culture to its neo-imperial war. Ukrainians and others have called for the ‘de-colonisation’ of Russian literature as part of the fabric of the imperial state. Others have argued that Russian literature is part of an alternative narrative to that of the authorities. In a recent New Yorker article, Elif Batuman writes, ‘Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it,’ saying, more or less, that a nineteenth-century Russian text read in twenty-first century Georgia or Ukraine carries a menace that she had previously missed.

Pushkin stands in the middle of this debate. Partly because of his work because, in a pure literary sense, all modern Russian literature flows from him. But even more so because of what he is seen to represent – because of his statues. A few decades after he died in 1837 aged only 37, he was elevated to the status of ‘Russia’s national writer’. That makes him a synecdoche for Russian culture as a whole: take down Pushkin’s statue and you are challenging Russia as a whole.

The Pushkin statue debate reveals different understandings of what ‘freedom’ means to different readers in Russia and its former imperial lands.

For Ukrainians the word ‘freedom’ now means a life-and-death struggle. Having experienced violence perpetrated by Russia in 2014 in the east of the country and then wholesale in 2022, the vast majority of Ukrainians now feel an existential need to emancipate themselves from Russia in most forms. To the educated class, that now includes the desire to disassociate themselves from Russian texts and films that have for centuries either explicitly or – more commonly, implicitly– denied Ukrainians agency in their own historical story. The ‘Pushkin Must Fall’ campaign, however crudely expressed at times, is part of this process.

Then there is the seemingly Sisyphean task of a large segment of Russians to win freedom from their own abusive rulers. Alexander Etkind employs the term ‘internal colonisation’ to describe the peculiar nature of Russian imperialism in being directed equally towards its own heartlands and to its captured territories. Putin’s war is also directed inwards, towards crushing the tentative freedoms that Russians had acquired in the last three decades since the Gorbachev era. If Russian literature has little or nothing to offer Ukrainians at the moment, much of it remains a sustained critique of this ‘internal colonisation’ of Russian minds and bodies, and inspires Russians to resist it.

But the repeated failure of this educated class to make a political difference asks some serious questions of them. Too often ‘Great Russian literature’ is fetishised. It also needs emancipation. Its classic literature needs to be freed from efforts to co-opt, and commodify it as an axiomatic model of ‘civilisation’ with all the assumptions of cultural superiority that entails.

That process should begin with Pushkin, whose works are still the victim of official curating, 200 years after they were first censored. If he was sometimes the imperialist, his most frequent poetic mode is a mocking irreverence that talks everyone, including himself, down from their pedestals. Pushkin deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath.

. . . .

Pushkin is a many-sided writer, open to multiple readings. Isaiah Berlin, in his essay about hedgehogs (who know one thing) and foxes (who know many things) called Pushkin ‘an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century’ and wrote of ‘the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius’. His greatest work, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, was reduced to melodrama by Tchaikovsky. The original gives all sides of his varied personality, pulling off the trick of being both casually intimate and profound. Among the many Pushkins are the exile, the rebel, the libertine, the historian, the servant of empire, the African. For the average Russian reader he is first of all the lover, the author of dozens of uninhibited love lyrics that are instantly learned by heart.

Pushkin continually returns to the theme of ‘freedom’. He was a friend of the Decembrists who staged an abortive coup d’etat against autocracy in 1825 in the name of constitutional rule. In his youth, he wrote politically seditious poems, including one, ‘The Dagger’, that celebrates regicide and caused him to be sent into exile. He later dropped his revolutionary stance but remained strongly anti-clerical and critical of autocracy. Pushkin’s mature personal philosophy was a kind of individualism that eschewed Romantic egoism. He wrote in a poem of 1836 to which he gave the title ‘From Pindemonte’ (pretending it was a translation to try and bamboozle the censor): ‘Whom shall we serve – the people or the State?/The poet does not care – so let them wait./To give account to none, to be one’s own/vassal and liege, to please oneself alone,/to bend neither one’s neck nor inner schemes/nor conscience for obtaining that which seems/power but is a flunkey’s coat.’

This Pushkin was for many Russian and Soviet readers a kind of blueprint on how to maintain dignity in spite of the state. In a lecture on Descartes and Pushkin, given in 1981, the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili said, ‘In the history of Russian literature there is also, it is true, a single but well-known example for us of a naturally free person. That is Pushkin.’ Mamardashvili elaborated that he meant neither a freedom from moral obligation, nor the kind of withdrawal into an avant-garde underground that some Russian intellectuals were resorting to in that era. Pushkin was an exemplar on how to inhabit a free private and civic space, but not retreat from society.

Yet Pushkin was also a child of empire. In 1924 the émigré critic Giorgy Fedotov named him ‘Bard of Empire and Freedom’, in an essay that locates him in Russia’s imperial history. Pushkin was a Russian patriot – although he also exposed that sentiment to mockery and said, ‘Of course, I despise my fatherland from head to foot but I feel upset when a foreigner shares my feelings.’ He was a man brought up among and by the imperial elite, who believed in Russia’s mission civilisatrice. He frequently returned to the figure of Peter the Great as a man of both vision and cruelty, who tried to transform a backward Russian society into a modern European state.

The poet of empire is most brazenly on show in his Romantic poem, ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’, written during his exile in the south of the empire in 1820-1. The main body of the poem itself is a Byronic Orientalising tale of a native woman’s doomed love affair with a Russian soldier. Pushkin shows empathy for his native protagonist, but then undermines it with a jingoistic epilogue that praises imperial bayonets and the Russian conquest of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. Some of his friends and contemporaries, such as the politically liberal Pyotr Vyazemsky, were confounded. How could he could defend the freedom of Greek revolutionaries or African slaves and not that of Russian colonial subjects?

Link to the rest at Engelsberg Ideas 

X remains primary social media platform for publishers

From The Bookseller:

Publishers say most of their social engagement still comes through X, formerly known as Twitter, though they are now actively engaging with alternatives such as Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon.  

Since business magnate Elon Musk completed his buyout of the networking site in 2022, there have been a number of changes, notably to the platform’s verification policies, stripping verified blue ticks from accounts which hadn’t signed up for its paid-for subscription service. Links to articles also changed to only show the associated image without the headline, making it difficult to share news. This has prompted the book community’s use of the platform to dissipate, but most publishers still see X as their main social media platform as it still has the largest number of active users and newer alternatives are not yet set up for scheduling. 

Jack Birch, senior digital marketing manager at Bloomsbury, told The Bookseller: “The users that have left Twitter/X since Musk’s takeover have not gone to a specific destination; they have fragmented across different platforms such as Blue Sky, Mastodon and Threads, as well as other platforms. As a company, we felt that Threads had the potential to be the biggest competitor to X, given Meta’s history of running successful social media apps and an existing audience that they could convert (cleverly linking Instagram followers to Threads at the click of a button). We hoped Instagram and Facebook users could pivot to a text-based social network, as well as pick up people leaving Musk’s X. However, after initial enthusiasm, interactions and impressions have dropped off a cliff.” 

He believes that despite the press for dwindling numbers on Twitter/X, it remains the place for “influential media figures” such as journalists and celebrities and is still where “news breaks first”. Birch also cited how two of the more recent campaigns, Ghosts: The Button House Archives and The Rest is History, “performed exceptionally well on X, partly due to pre-existing, established fandoms, as well as each book’s content suiting the platform”.

He said that Bloomsbury believes Mastodon and Blue Sky are “currently too complicated for the general user to have wider popular appeal at least at the moment”. He added: “Our social media management platform, Sprout Social, does not currently allow us to schedule posts on these two platforms. With all of this in mind, we have put more energy into our Instagram and TikTok channels. Though content usually takes longer to produce, we are seeing excellent returns on engagements and impressions. As a company, we also have direct relationships with Meta and TikTok, and are able to solve any issues that may affect our accounts.”   

“The social media landscape has always changed very quickly, but, since Musk’s takeover of X, it is even more unstable than it ever has been before. We have a large, and engaged, social media following on Meta, TikTok and X; it is still there where we see our key audience.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

When American Words Invaded the Greatest English Dictionary

From The Wall Street Journal:

Most people think of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary as a quintessentially British production, but if you pore carefully over the first edition, compiled between 1858 and 1928, you will find thousands of American words.

There are familiar words describing nature particular to the U.S., like prairieskunkcoyote and chipmunk, but also more recondite ones, like catawba (a species of grape and type of sparkling wine), catawampous (fierce, destructive) and cottondom (the region in which cotton is grown). Today, Americanisms are easy for modern lexicographers to find because of the internet and access to large data sets. But all of the American words in that first edition found their way to Oxford in an age when communication across the Atlantic was far more difficult.

The OED was one of the world’s first crowdsourced projects—the Wikipedia of the 19th century—in which people around the English-speaking world were invited to read their country’s books and submit words for consideration on 4-by-6-inch slips of paper. Until recently, it wasn’t known how many people responded, exactly who they were or how they helped. But in 2014, several years after working as an editor on the OED, I was revisiting a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement where the dictionary’s archive is stored, and I came across a dusty box.

Inside the box was a small black book tied with cream-colored ribbon. On its pages was the immaculate handwriting of James Murray, the OED’s longest-serving editor. It was his 150-year-old address book recording the names and addresses of people who contributed to the largest English dictionary ever written.

There were six address books in all from that era, and for the past eight years I have researched the people listed inside. Three thousand or so in total, they were a vivid and eccentric bunch. Most were not the scholarly elite you might expect. The top four contributors globally, one of whom sent in 165,061 slips, were all connected with psychiatric hospitals (or “lunatic asylums” as they were called at the time); three were inmates and one was a chief administrator. There were three murderers and the owner of the world’s largest collection of pornography who, yes, sent in sex words, especially related to bondage and flagellation. 

You can’t go a page or two in Murray’s address books without seeing a name that he had underlined in thick red pencil. These are the Americans: politicians, soldiers, librarians, homemakers, booksellers, lawyers, coin collectors and pharmacists. They ranged from luminaries like Noah Thomas Porter, who edited Webster’s Dictionary and became president of Yale University, to unknowns such as 21-year-old Carille Winthrop Atwood, who loved the classical world and lived in a large house with several other young women in a fashionable area of San Francisco. The most prolific American contributor was Job Pierson, a clergyman from Ionia, Mich., who owned the state’s largest private library and sent in 43,055 slips featuring words from poetry, drama and religion. 

Murray marked Americanism with a “U.S” label, including casket (coffin),  comforter (eiderdown), baggage (luggage), biscuit (scone) and faucet (tap). He was often at pains to add details: For pecan tree, he included that it was “common in [the] Ohio and Mississippi valleys.” He noted that candy, not quite an Americanism, was “in [the] U.S. used more widely than in Great Britain, including toffy and the like.”

. . . .

Some American contributors involved in certain causes sought to make sure that their associated words got into the dictionary, like Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia, who hid escaped slaves at her home. Her contributions included abhorrent and abolition.

Others turned to their hobbies. Noteworthy Philadelphian Henry Phillips, Jr., an antiquarian and pioneer of the new language Esperanto, ensured that the dictionary had a generous coverage of words relating to coins and numismatics: electrum (coins made of an alloy of gold and silver with traces of copper) and gun money (money coined from the metal of old guns). 

Francis Atkins, a medical doctor at a military base in New Mexico, read books relating to Native American cultures and sent in sweat-house (a hut in which hot air or vapor baths are taken) and squash (the vegetable), a word borrowed from the Narragansett asquutasquash. He also contributed ranching words: rutting season (mating season), pronghorn (an antelope) and bison (a wild ox).

Others had their favorite authors. Anna Wyckoff Olcott, one of 27 contributors from New York City (she lived on West 13th Street in Manhattan), took responsibility for providing entries from the works of Louisa May Alcott. Those included the term deaconed, from “Little Women,” defined in the OED as “U.S. slang” meaning the practice of packing fruit with the finest specimens on top. (“The blanc-mange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked, having been skilfully ‘deaconed.’”)

In Boston, Nathan Matthews advised the OED for six years before becoming the city’s mayor and the person who spearheaded Boston’s subway system, the first in the U.S. But it was his brother, the historian and etymologist Albert Matthews, who was the second-highest ranking American contributor, sending in 30,480 slips from his reading of American historical sources including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving. 

Albert Matthews in particular enabled the OED to include words that no Brit would have ever have heard or needed to use. He sent in stockadedwhitefish and a rare American use of suck, meaning “the place at which a body of water moves in such a way as to suck objects into its vortex.” His reading of Daniel Denton’s “A Brief Description of New York” (1670) provided evidence for persimmonpossum, raccoon skinpowwow (spelled at the time “pawow”) and the first time that huckleberry ever appeared in print: “The fruits Natural to the Island are Mulberries, Posimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries.” 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

“I cannot wait to possess you”: Reading 18th-century letters for the first time

From Ars Technica:

University of Cambridge historian Renaud Morieux was poring over materials at the National Archives in Kew when he came across a box holding three piles of sealed letters held together by ribbons. The archivist gave him permission to open the letters, all addressed to 18th-century French sailors from their loved ones and seized by Great Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

“I realized I was the first person to read these very personal messages since they’re written,” said Morieux, who just published his analysis of the letters in the journal Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales. “These letters are about universal human experiences, they’re not unique to France or the 18th century. They reveal how we all cope with major life challenges. When we are separated from loved ones by events beyond our control like the pandemic or wars, we have to work out how to stay in touch, how to reassure, care for people and keep the passion alive. Today we have Zoom and WhatsApp. In the 18th century, people only had letters, but what they wrote about feels very familiar.”

England and France have a long, complicated history of being at war, most notably the Hundred Years’ War in the 14th and 15th centuries. The two countries were also almost continuously at war during the 18th century, including the Seven Years’ War, which was fought in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific as England and France tried to establish global dominance with the aid of their respective allies. The war technically evolved out of the North American colonies when England tried to expand into territory the French had already claimed. (Fun fact: A 22-year-old George Washington led a 1754 ambush on a French force at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.) But the conflict soon spread beyond colonial borders, and the British went on to seize hundreds of French ships at sea.

According to Morieux, despite its collection of excellent ships during this period, France was short on experienced sailors, and the large numbers imprisoned by the British—nearly a third of all French sailors in 1758—didn’t help matters. Many sailors eventually returned home, although a few died during their imprisonment, usually from malnutrition or illness. It was no easy feat delivering correspondence from France to a constantly moving ship; often multiple copies were sent to different ports in hopes of increasing the odds of a letter reaching its intended recipient.

This particular batch of letters was addressed to various crew members of a French warship called the Galitee, which was captured by a British ship called the Essex en route from Bordeaux to Quebec in 1758. Morieux’s genealogical research accounted for every member of the crew. Naturally, some of the missives were love letters from wives to their husbands, such as the one Marie Dubosc wrote to her husband, a ship’s lieutenant named Louis Chambrelan, in 1758, professing herself his “forever faithful wife.” Morieux’s research showed that Marie died the following year before her husband was released; Chambrelan remarried when he returned to France, having never received his late wife’s missive.

Morieux read several letters addressed to a young sailor from Normandy named Nicolas Quesnel, from both his 61-year-old mother, Marguerite, and his fiancée, Marianne. Marguerite’s letters chided the young man for writing more often to Marianne and not to her, laying the guilt thick. “I think more about you than you about me,” the mother wrote (or more likely, dictated to a trusted scribe), adding, “I think I am for the tomb, I have been ill for three weeks.” (Translation: “Why don’t you write to your poor sick mother before I die?”)

Apparently, Quesnel’s neglect of his mother caused some tension with the fiancée since Marianne wrote three weeks later asking him to please write to his mom and remove the “black cloud” in the household. But then Marguerite merely complained that Quesnel made no mention of his stepfather in his letters home, so the poor young man really couldn’t win. Quesnel survived his imprisonment, per Morieux, and ended up working on a transatlantic slave ship.

Link to the rest at Ars Technica

The King’s English? Forgeddabouddit!

From Literary Review:

Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are misplaced – at least according to the linguist Valerie Fridland.

Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude does an excellent job of vindicating words and ways of speaking we love to hate. Tracing your ‘verys’ and your singular ‘theys’ across centuries and continents, Fridland offers a history of linguistic pet peeves that are much older than we might assume and have more important functions in communication than most of us would like to give them credit for.

Take intensifiers like ‘totally’, ‘pretty’ and ‘completely’. We might consciously believe them to be exaggerations undermining the speaker’s point, yet people consistently report seeing linguistic booster-users as more authoritative and likeable than others.

Then take ‘um’ and ‘uh’ (or ‘umm’ and ‘uhh’, and their consonant-multiplying siblings). Both receive an undue amount of flak for being fillers, supposedly deployed when the speaker is grasping for words, unsure what they want to say or lacking ideas. But this is not so. Fridland explains that they typically precede unfamiliar words or ideas, as well as complex sentence structures. Such non-semantic additions do what silent pauses and coughing can’t: they help the speaker speak and the listener listen. Similarly, the widely abhorred free-floating ‘like’ does not cut randomly into a ‘proper’ sentence but rather inserts itself, according to the logic of the language, either at the beginning of a sentence or before a verb, noun or adjective. It’s a form of ‘discourse marker’, used to ‘contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions’, writes Fridland. She points out that Shakespeare used discourse markers frequently, while the epic poem Beowulf begins with one (Hwæt!).

If what we think is ‘bad English’ is so good, why is nobody encouraging us to use those little flashy friends like ‘dude’, ‘actually’ and ‘WTF’? Corporate career guides and oratory platforms like Toastmasters warn against too many interrupters. The reason is that they supposedly make you sound insecure, weak, inexperienced and right-out dumb – like a young woman, basically. The world of power and prestige is rife with bias against ‘like’ and company, and so are our day-to-day interactions with friends and neighbours, who may judge us for that extra ‘literally’ or spontaneous ‘oh’. It’s precisely this prejudice that Fridland sets out to dismantle, arguing that linguistic change is a natural occurrence and that pronouncements on the bad and the good of language are socially motivated.

When we devalue a group’s speech habits, we perceive otherness fuelled by differences in race, class, gender, sexuality and education. To say ‘three dollar’ rather than ‘three dollars’ is not sloppy, Fridland states, but part and parcel of consonant loss at the end of English words that has its roots in the late Middle Ages, when the stress patterns of Norman French and Old Norse led to final letters being cast off. Why should we embarrass others for similar habits?

Fridland does well to burst the bubble of mockery around Californian girls’ vocal fry (think the creaking voices of Paris Hilton and the Kardashians), unpicking the social meanings we attach to verbal patterns we find unacceptable. We tend to dislike (and believe reprehensible) what we’re not regularly exposed to. And that often happens to be the language of vulnerable communities, such as black and brown people, teenagers and women. These groups often propel linguistic change. Children and teenagers, for example, are voracious speakers, eager to explore and play with new forms of language as their speech patterns haven’t quite settled. Women – particularly young women – are the Formula 1 drivers of language change, and have always been. Fridland explains that many modern English forms, such as the S ending of the third-person singular verb (‘it does’ rather than ‘it doth’), were pushed on by women and girls, whose ears tend to be more sensitive to linguistic nuances. While men are likely to snap up already-current words, such as ‘bro’, in order to signal social affiliation, women create new verbal spaces into which other people eventually step. ‘What women [bring] to the fore’, Fridland says, is ‘novelty in the form of this expressivity, not greater expressivity itself’. Once a change has become widely accepted, there is no difference in gender use, despite our perceptions

Link to the rest at Literary Review

For those who don’t know what a vocal fry (formerly glottal fry) is, you’ll hear and see an example below.

https://youtu.be/iY-ehIyRY_Q?si=HAkinbljEy0M0cQM

PRH UK had a “good year, boosted by a great bestseller performance.” BTW, you’re fired!

From The New Publishing Standard:

The “38 roles” being eliminated at PRH UK is not huge in the layoff scheme of things, rather just one more tranche of redundancies across the US and UK publishing industry that momentarily gains a headline, and is then forgotten.

Jobs? Hey, this is business. No-one said you had a job for life. Least of all now.

Forget all the BS about record profits, soaring global readership, literacy rates “through the roof,” etc. (Markus Dohle, May 2023). Take no notice of the fact that PRH CEO Tim Weldon has literally just told us PRH UK had a “good year boosted by a great bestseller performance.”

Didn’t you know the publishing industry is facing challenging times? Headwinds, in fact.

Explains Weldon: “Global geopolitical and macroeconomic factors have created volatility and uncertainty for all economies and businesses, which have escalated over the past few years. On a micro level, the book market is impacted in many ways by these factors. It is getting increasingly harder – and more expensive – to do business, driven by cost inflation, supply chain complexity and a slowing market coming off the high of the pandemic. Paper, for instance, is more than 20% more expensive than it was in 2018. Increasing book prices (resulting from the rising costs) have buoyed the market but overall volumes are down by 4.5% versus last year.

Wait, what? Obviously Weldon didn’t get the memo from former PRH CEO Markus Dohle, who as recently as May was telling us how bright the future of publishing is. Said Dohle, “Physical bookselling is having a great renaissance,” adding, “I’m optimistic about the future of a diverse books retail landscape going forward. The physical format…is getting a lot larger, and that doesn’t show any signs of weakness. It’s quite the opposite.

Just to be clear.

Dohle: “Physical bookselling is having a great renaissanceThe physical format (that’s print to normal folk)…is getting a lot larger, and that doesn’t show any signs of weakness. It’s quite the opposite.

Weldon: “Increasing book prices (resulting from the rising costs) have buoyed the market but overall volumes are down by 4.5% versus last year.”

Dohle: “I’m optimistic about the future of a diverse books retail landscape going forward.”

Weldon: ” It is getting increasingly harder – and more expensive – to do business, driven by cost inflation, supply chain complexity and a slowing market coming off the high of the pandemic.”

So are we to presume the headwinds Weldon talks about suddenly appeared since May?

Obviously not, and that’s just one more example of why the May TNPS polemic addressing Dohle’s disturbing disconnect with the realities of publishing needed to be written.

But Weldon and Dohle are cut from the same cloth. Both Old Guard gatekeepers, sincerely believing they know what’s best for the unwashed reading masses. Both living in a corporate bubble comfortably apart from publishing realities and the daily struggle to pay the bills that mere employees and regular authors face every day. And both staunch opponents of digital innovation in publishing. Subscription, anyone?

This was Weldon in 2014, after Scribd and Oyster first got into subscription:

We are not convinced it is what readers want. ‘Eat everything you can’ isn’t a reader’s mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don’t think you want 10,000 books.”

Who can possibly argue with that? This man knows a reader’s mindset. That is why PRH publishes so few books, because nobody wants ten thousand books to choose from. And as we all know, even back in 2014 no bookshop anywhere had ten thousand books. That would be ridiculous.

What he was saying, of course, was that nobody wants ten thousand digital books, because that’s a slippery slope for what Dohle calls “the physical format”, and that’s always been the driver for PRH policy. Keep the brake on digital consumption to protect Dohle’s bet on print.

And as the years rolled by, Weldon kept on misreading the market. As the Pandemic arrived in 2020, PRH UK was among the first publishers to furlough its staff, not for one second imagining that lockdown might bring more people to the book market, leading to record profits in 2021.

And of course Weldon, and Dohle, immediately shared those record profits by raising author royalties.

No, hold on. In my authorly dreams.

Weldon explained in 2014 that PRH was always looking at how much authors were being compensated.

Authors are, alongside readers, the foundation of our business. We are always, always looking at our commercial arrangements with authors to make sure they’re fair and equitable.”

Which of course is why, a decade on, after record profits and revenues, amid a “renaissance“, a market that “shows no sign of weakness“, and unbridled optimism “about the future of a diverse books retail landscape going forward,” royalty rates remain unchanged. And jobs are being shed at a rate of knots.

And that brings us full circle to the thrust of this essay, which is that jobs and pay in publishing, along with royalties and advances for those who are “the foundation of our business,” authors, are no more secure today than ten, thirty or fifty years ago.

Weldon on the latest job cuts: “I appreciate this is very difficult news. People are – and have always been – at the heart of our business, and so as a leader you never want to have to make these kinds of decisions.

Those may be very sincere words, although I somehow doubt Tom’s losing sleep over it. His job is secure.

But here’s the thing: Industry jobs are lost, we read it in the industry news feeds for five seconds, and then we get on with our own lives. These 38 role eliminations will be forgotten next week as another bout of industry job losses somewhere else briefly pops onto our radar.

Sometimes jobs have to go. Companies have to move with the times. We all understand that. “That’s life,” we say, and get back to listening to music on subscription and watching films and TV on subscription while ranting against the very idea of subscription books. The sky is falling!

But supposing those 38 jobs had been lost due to AI… What a different story it would be.

Not because we care any more about the person who lost their livelihood to AI (who can point to anyone who has?) as opposed to “a slowing market coming off the high of the pandemic,” but because the very initials A.I. strike irrational fear into what Lee Child would call our “lizard brains.”

Show me the court case where lawyers are busy fighting for author or employee careers because a publisher is shedding jobs or not renewing publishing contracts or not paying enough royalties. It doesn’t happen.

Yet right now there are lawyers milking the AI publishing bandwagon, getting paid to tell a judge AI is a threat to author careers.

. . . .

Just look at the feeble submission to the UK government that various publishing industry bodies knocked up to try influence British govt. thinking (I use the term loosely) about AI. As if the UK government gives a flying fig about jobs and authorly rights in publishing.

Authors, translators, narrators, industry employees, et al, all have a right to be treated with decency and dignity, to fair remuneration, and to have their IPs protected.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

PG is a big fan of The New Publishing Standard, in part because it has a broad international focus different than most publishing news periodicals which mostly focus on a single country or a small group of countries. Visitors to TPV may wish to check out TNPS.

Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America

From The Wall Street Journal:

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) was neither a systematic thinker nor a system builder, neither a philosopher nor a historian. His subject was society—make that societies, their strengths and their weaknesses, which he studied always in search of what gives them their character. Along with Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Max Weber, Ortega y Gasset, Tocqueville was a cosmopolitan intellectual of the kind that appears only at the interval of centuries.

Tocqueville is of course best known for his “Democracy in America,” a work which may be more quoted from than actually read. The first part of it was published in 1835, based on observations made when he visited the U.S. in 1831, at age 26. His powers of observation, and skill at generalization, were evident at the outset. They never slackened over the remainder of his life.

Tocqueville’s skill at formulating observations was unfailingly acute. “In politics, shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships,” he wrote. “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” At the close of “Democracy in America,” he predicted the coming hegemonies of Russia and the U.S. George Santayana, in a letter to his friend Horace Kallen, wrote: “Intelligence is the power of seeing things in the past, present, and future as they have been, are, and will be.” He might have been describing Alexis de Tocqueville.

The first volume of “Democracy in America” was well received. The second volume, published in 1840—more critical and more dubious of the virtues of democracy—was less so. Yet the work stayed in print for a full century, even though its author’s reputation had long since faded. Then, in 1938, with the publication of Tocqueville’s correspondence and other hitherto uncollected writings, that reputation, more than revived, became set in marble.

Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America” by Jeremy Jennings, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, thus joins a long shelf of books dedicated to the man and his works. Four full biographies of Tocqueville have been published, the last, Hugh Brogan’s “Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life,” in 2006. Nearly every aspect of Tocqueville’s work has been treated in essays, articles and book-length studies. I happened to have published a slender volume myself, “Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy’s Guide” (2006), in which I wrote: “What would have surprised Tocqueville, one suspects, is the persistence with which his writings have remained alive, part of the conversation on the great subject of the importance of politics in life.” It would have surprised him, I believe, because of his innate modesty and his belief that his work was far from finished.

Tocqueville’s trip to America, which would be the making of him, had its origin in his wish to escape the reign of Louis-Philippe, king of France, whose Orléans family had been sympathetic to the French Revolution and were thus viewed askance by the house of Tocqueville. With his friend Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville proposed a visit to America to study penal institutions in the new republic; the two magistrates were granted permission, though they would have to pay their own expenses.

In “Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America,” Mr. Jennings sets out the importance of travel to Alexis de Tocqueville. “In exploring why, where, and how Tocqueville travelled,” he writes, “this volume seeks to show that travel played an integral role in framing and informing his intellectual enquiries.” Throughout his life, we learn, “Tocqueville longed to travel,” and this appetite for travel did not “diminish with either age or illness.” As Tocqueville wrote to his friend Louis de Kergorlay: “I liken man in this world to a traveller who is walking constantly toward an increasingly cold region and who is forced to move more as he advances.”

Mr. Jennings proves a splendid guide to Tocqueville’s travels. These included trips, some lengthier than others, to Italy, Algeria, Germany, Switzerland, England and Ireland. Basing his book on Tocqueville’s rich correspondence and notebooks, Mr. Jennings describes his subject’s preparations, his arrivals, his daily encounters in what for Tocqueville were new lands. Even when he did not publish works about these places, he was recording his thoughts. Above all, the author establishes the unceasing intellectual stimulation that Tocqueville found in travel. The spirit of inquiry was never quiescent in him, and, as Mr. Jennings notes, even on his honeymoon “Tocqueville managed to find time to study the Swiss political system.”

Much of the attraction of “Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America” derives from its chronicle of Tocqueville’s quotidian life and his many interesting opinions of historical and contemporary figures. Tocqueville said that Napoleon was “as great as a man can be without virtue.” His English friend Nassau Senior records Tocqueville saying of Napoleon that his “taste was defective in everything, in small things as well as great ones; in books, art, and in women as well as in ambition and glory; and his idolizers cannot be men of much better taste.”

Tocqueville remarked on the “impatience always aroused in him by the national self-satisfaction of the Germans,” and found Italy “the most unpleasant country I have ever visited on my travels.” As for Switzerland, he noted that “at the bottom of their souls the Swiss show no deep respect for law, no love of legality, no abhorrence of the use of force, without which there cannot be a free country.”

Yet he described America as “the most singular country in the world.” Among other things, during his nine months there, he was taken by its citizens’ enthusiasm for their own system of government. Americans, he found, “believe in the wisdom of the masses, assuming the latter are well informed; and appear to be unclouded by suspicions that the populace may never share in a special kind of knowledge indispensable for governing a state.”

He, Tocqueville, did not share their unabated enthusiasm: “What I see in this country tells me that, even in the most favorable circumstances, and they exist here, the government of the multitude is not a good thing.” Tocqueville was wary of what had been done to the American Indian, and predicted that “within a hundred years there will not remain in North America either a single tribe or even a single man belonging to the most remarkable of Indian races.” His views on slavery in America were even bleaker, harsher. “The Americans are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men,” he wrote. He thought, correctly as we now know, slavery to be “the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States.”

Alexis de Tocqueville was a passionate man, and about liberty he was most passionate of all. By liberty he meant the absence of despotism, whether by monarchs or multitudes. “Liberty is the first of my passions,” he wrote, referring to it as “a good so precious and necessary,” adding that “whoever seeks for anything from freedom but itself is made for slavery.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

AI Doomers Take Center Stage at the UK’s AI Summit

From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance:

A fierce debate over how much to focus on the supposed existential risks of artificial intelligence defined the kickoff of the UK’s AI Safety Summit on Wednesday, highlighting broader tensions in the tech community as lawmakers propose regulations and safeguards.

Tech leaders and academics attending the Summit at Bletchley Park, the former home of secret World War II code-breakers, disagreed over whether to prioritize immediate risks from AI — such as fueling discrimination and misinformation — verses concerns that it could lead to the end of human civilization.

Some attendees openly worried so-called AI doomers would dominate the proceedings — a fear compounded by news that Elon Musk would appear alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak shortly after the billionaire raised the specter of AI leading to “the extinction of humanity” on a podcast. On Wednesday, the UK government also unveiled the Bletchley Declaration, a communique signed by 28 countries warning of the potential for AI to cause “catastrophic harm.”

“I hope that it doesn’t get dominated by the doomer, X-risk, ‘Terminator’-scenario discourse, and I’ll certainly push the conversation towards practical, near-term harms,” said Aidan Gomez, co-founder and chief executive officer of AI company Cohere Inc., ahead of the summit.

Top tech executives spent the week trading rhetorical blows over the subject. Meta Platforms Inc.’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun accused rivals, including DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, of playing up existential risks of the technology in an attempt “to perform a regulatory capture” of the industry. Hassabis then hit back in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, calling the criticisms preposterous.

On the summit’s fringes, Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, said there’s “genuine debate between those who take a potentially catastrophic view of AI and those who take the view that it’s a series of individual, sometimes-serious problems, that need to be managed.”

“While the undertones of that debate are running through all of the discussions,” Martin said, “I think there’s an acceptance from virtually everybody that the international, public and private communities need to do both. It’s a question of degree.”

In closed-door sessions at the summit, there were discussions about whether to pause the development of next-generation “frontier” AI models and the “existential threat” this technology may pose “to democracy, human rights, civil rights, fairness, and equality,” according to summaries published by the British government late Wednesday.

Between seminars, Musk was “mobbed” and “held court” with delegates from tech companies and civil society, according to a diplomat. But during a session about the risks of losing control of AI, he quietly listened, according to another attendee, who said the seminar was nicknamed the “Group of Death.”

Matt Clifford, a representative of the UK Prime Minister who helped organize the summit, tried to square the circle and suggest the disagreement over AI risks wasn’t such a dichotomy.

“This summit’s not focused on long-term risk; this summit’s focused on next year’s models,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “How do we address potentially catastrophic risks — as it says in the Bletchley Declaration — from those models?” he said. “The ‘short term, long term’ distinction is very often overblown.”

By the end of the summit’s first day, there were some signs of a rapprochement between the two camps. Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who previously called to pause the development of powerful AI systems, said “this debate is starting to melt away.”

Link to the rest at Yahoo Finance

What is Left Unsaid: How Some Words Do—Or Don’t—Make It Into Print

From The Literary Hub:

One summer morning in 1883, Alexander John Ellis sat at his desk in front of three large bay windows, opened wide to catch any breeze that London’s Kensington had to give. From his chair, he could hear the birds in the plane trees and see right down Argyll Road, its five-story white stucco Georgian houses resembling layers of an expensive wedding cake. By the time everyone else was rising, Ellis had generally already been up for several hours. Early morning was his favorite time of day. Ellis loved the notion of getting ahead while others were sleeping, and getting work done before his neighbor, a master singer, started his scales and taught his students by the open window. “The nuisance is awful at times,” he wrote to Murray. Ellis always ate the same light breakfast of a French roll with butter, and drank his signature beverage: a cup of warm water with a little milk.

This day, as every day, his first act on waking was to weigh himself naked, before dressing for the day. Always the same boots and coat, affectionately named Barges and Dreadnought, before heading straight to his desk on the second floor. He needed to weigh himself before putting on his clothes for one main reason: Dreadnought was heavy. Dreadnought had twenty-eight pockets, each one stuffed full with eccentric items. Ellis made a noise like a kitchen drawer as he walked. When he sat down, eyewitnesses said that his pockets “stood upright like sentinels.” They were variously full of letters, nail clippers, string, a knife sharpener, a book and philological papers in case of emergency, and two things that a teetotaller and someone who watched his weight rarely needed: a corkscrew and a scone, just in case friends were in want of either. These last two items sum up Ellis; he was kind-hearted and always thought of his friends before himself.

On his desk, there were signs of everything that he held dear: a draft of the fifth and final volume of his monumental book, On Early English Pronunciation, daguerreotypes of Venice and his three children, a tuning fork, and a favorite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism, “Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servant of the heart, and should never be its slave.”

This morning held a special excitement: also spread out in front of him were Murray’s proof sheets for the first section of the Dictionary (words A to Ant)—all 362 pages of them. Murray had sent them to Ellis for his comment. As Ellis’s eyes skimmed the proofs, he could not help looking for his own name in the Introduction. He felt a sense of profound satisfaction to see “A. J. Ellis, Esq, FRS (Phonology)” listed between Prof. Frederick Pollock (Legal terms) and Dr P. H. Pye-Smith (Medical and Biological words).

Ellis’s passions were pronunciation, music, and mathematics, and his expertise in all of these areas had been sought by Murray who had had difficulty finding British academics to help him (by contrast, American scholars were eager to be involved). He had helped Murray with the very first entry in the Dictionary—A: not only the sound A, “the low-back-wide vowel formed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips,” but also the musical sense of A, “the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major,” and finally the algebraic sense of A, “as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used to express known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown.” Ellis was happy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, including the words air, alert, algebra.

Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”

Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.

Ellis had raised an important question about inclusion, but he was not quite right about the boundaries of the Dictionary. Murray had included slang but it was true that, so far, he had left out obscenities. We can only imagine the uproar in Victorian society had he not. Murray would agonize over his decision to leave them out, but also had to be mindful of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 which made it illegal to expose the public to any content judged to be grossly indecent.

Murray’s caution proved wise when, a few years later, a fellow lexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, had his own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with William Henley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing the letters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took his publisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jury that writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personally guilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs. Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Act by arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, not the public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henley was published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck and many other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and the public outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

. . . .

Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had to be sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within a larger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising him not to include the word condom. “I am writing on a very obscene subject. There is an article called Cundum…a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well- deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation,” he wrote to Murray. “Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair was named after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.” But he had found a quotation from 1705 referring to a “Quondam” which made him rethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. “I suppose Cundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary,” he concluded. Murray left it out.

Dixon was the man who unwisely advised Murray to delete the entry for appendicitis because it was, according to Dixon, just another itis-word. “Surely you will not attempt to enter all the crack-jaw medical and surgical words. What do you think of ‘Dacryocystosyringoketokleitis’? You know doctors think the way to indicate any inflammation is to tack on ‘itis’ to a word.” The word’s deletion turned out to be an embarrassment to Murray and Oxford University Press when, in 1902, the coronation of Edward VII was postponed because of the King’s attack of appendicitis. Suddenly everyone was using the word, but no one could find it in the Dictionary, and since the letter A was already published it could not be added until the Supplement volume in 1933.

But back to the summer of 1883. Murray received the corrected proofs from Ellis. He not only appreciated Ellis’s feedback but also trusted his judgement: he promptly deleted all claims to exhaustiveness and wrote, “The aim of this Dictionary is to furnish an adequate account of the meaning, origin, and history of English words now in general use, or known to be in use.”

. . . .

I had been wondering how Ellis got to be such a word nerd? I was fascinated by what I discovered. To begin with, something very unusual happened when he was eleven years old. His mother’s cousin, a schoolmaster called William Ellis, offered to give the young boy a substantial inheritance if he would change his surname from Sharpe to Ellis. Mr and Mrs Sharpe agreed, and from then on “Alexander John Sharpe” became “Alexander John Ellis.” The young boy was enrolled at Shrewsbury School and Eton, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and never had to earn money for the rest of his life.

Ellis’s wealth enabled him to be the quintessential “gentleman scholar,” an expert in almost everything he did, be it music, mathematics, languages, phonetics, travel, or daguerreotype photography. He was a polymath for whom life was more a science than an art. He published over 300 articles and books, and his works are quoted in the OED 200 times.

His interest in accent and pronunciation was inspired by the fact that he was born to a middle-class family in Hoxton, east London, where he was exposed to working-class cockney speakers, followed by schooling at Shrewsbury with its Welsh and English accents, and then exposed to the Received Pronunciation of the upper and upper-middle classes at Eton and Cambridge.

Words were like children to Ellis. He loved them equally, regardless of whether they were common, technical, scientific, slang, or foreign. He read the Dictionary as though it were a novel. Some words gave him pure delight in both their sound and meaning such as absquatulate, to abscond or decamp, with a quotation from Haliburton’s Clockmaker. “Absquotilate [sic] it in style, you old skunk…and show the gentlemen what you can do.” But it was their sounds that captured his imagination most. The quality of a whisper or a creak; the stress of a syllable; high pitch or low pitch.

Most people hear sounds, but Ellis saw them. He saw the air move in the mouth, the way the tip of the tongue touched the ridge of the teeth for a t; the vibration of vocal cords to change it to a d; and how the base of the tongue moved back in the mouth to block the flow of air for a g. Every sound was a picture for Ellis. He devoted his life to painting these pictures, describing their systematic order so the world might better understand the fundamentals of language.

His book On Early English Pronunciation, published in five volumes between 1869 and 1889, traced the pronunciation of English from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century and established him as a world authority on English phonology, a pioneer in the field of speech-sound studies. For the nineteenth-century section of the book, Ellis enlisted the help of hundreds of informants across Britain and a small group of experts, including Murray and others within the OED network. The result was the first major study of British dialects.

No language yet existed for the patterns Ellis was identifying, so he often had to invent the words, which subsequently made it into the Dictionary: palatalized, to make a palatal sound (by moving the point of contact between tongue and palate further forward in the mouth); labialization, the action of making a speech sound labial (articulated with both lips); and labiopalatalized, a sound made into a labiopalatal (articulated with the front of the tongue against the hard palate and the lips). He also invented the words septendecimal, relating to a seventeenth (in music); and phonetician, which originally referred to an advocate of phonetic spelling, rather than its current meaning of “an expert of phonetics.” Quite a few of his inventions have since fallen out of use and appear in the Dictionary with a dagger sign (which indicates obsolescence) beside them, such as vocalistic, of or relating to vowels, and phonotyper, an advocate of phonotypy (another term which Ellis invented, meaning “a system of phonetic printing”).

Ellis was one of the phoneticians on whom George Bernard Shaw modeled the character of Henry Higgins, that master of pronunciation, in his play Pygmalion, later turned into the musical My Fair Lady. Higgins (as a bet with his gentlemen friends) teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak “proper” English; but Ellis had none of Henry Higgins’s snobbery or arrogance. He was a generous, down-to-earth man, a frequent correspondent with friends, happy to offer advice when asked, and always working to bring people together and support them.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

PG notes that the OP is from a recently released book titled, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. Since PG has had a long-time attraction to The OED, he is likely going to obtain a copy of The Dictionary People in a reputable manner.

For a long time, PG has owned a copy of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which consists of two heavy volumes in a case that also holds a magnifying glass. (You didn’t think the folks in Oxford could squeeze the 20 heavy volumes in the original set into two heavy volumes without squeezing the original words down to mouse-type size did you?)

During his younger days, PG could read the tiny type in the Compact Edition without using the magnifying glass, but that is no longer true.

However, the many virtues of The Compact Edition notwithstanding, all dictionary nerds know that there is no substitute for the full and weighty Oxford English Dictionary Experience.

And don’t forget the additional three volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, each of which includes about 3,000 new words, for example, buckyball, nanotechnology, and freeware.

Shakespeare in Bloomsbury

From The Wall Street Journal:

I went to Shakespeare’s Globe to see “The Winter’s Tale” in London last March, on a freezing, rainy night. The mood was brightened by the production’s droll Autolycus, one of the Bard’s great con men and clowns. He teased and cajoled; he brought theatergoers up to dance with the actors; he threw in references to Brexit and Boris. Decorum resumed in the final act, in which the statue comes to life, with all the grave enchantment the text demanded.

When the revels ended, I shuffled with the crowd toward the Underground and happened to glance down a garbage-strewn alleyway, where I saw a skinny, shivering, tawny little fox. Unaware that this is a common sight in the city, I felt caught in the same time warp that the ancient play, with its modern interjections, had just evinced. It was as if the year was 1610 and the fox had hitched a ride on a rural wagon to the big city—yet somehow it was also here in 2023. The Britons who first saw “The Winter’s Tale” were mourning the death of their long-reigning Elizabeth; Londoners in our century had just lost their own. Both eras had recently seen the theaters close and reopen because of plague. Both audiences of the Globe had wanted to believe that a statue had come to life, and maybe it had.

As it turns out, these are just the kinds of ruminations that the Bloomsbury group, that famous coterie of early-20th-century British writers and artists, would have dismissed as lightweight and slightly vulgar. (The original group included the writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry.) Bloomsbury’s keen interest in Shakespeare did not lie in comparisons between their age and the Elizabethans’, in the historical roots of the plays, or in questions about provenance. They were not much concerned with Shakespeare’s character or with his beliefs. They deplored most of the professional productions they saw, complaining that they were (as one of them said) “smothered in scenery” and objecting to the fussy intonations of the players. “Acting it they spoil the poetry,” Virginia Woolf wrote to her nephew in 1935.

Instead, for the most part, the Bloomsbury group exercised its passion for Shakespeare simply by reading the plays and the sonnets, sometimes aloud together, but more often silently to themselves. Their relationship with him existed almost entirely through his language, with which they all felt an evangelical connection, intense and personal. In the beginning and the end, for them, was the word.

The subject of how different eras engage with Shakespeare is a juicy one, and an excellent choice for Marjorie Garber, a longtime professor of English at Harvard as well as the distinguished author of six previous books about Shakespeare among more than 20 volumes on subjects literary and otherwise. “Shakespeare in Bloomsbury” is a survey rather than an argument, proposing no more tendentious a thesis than that the members of the group adored Shakespeare and that she is going to show readers how in the most expansive and delightful way possible.

And this she does, propelling those readers through a lively inventory of the playwright’s imprints on Bloomsbury’s lives and works. She points out the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s frequent nods to Shakespeare serve as a “network of shared reference,” a handshake of recognition between a writer and her audience. Woolf’s 1927 novel “To the Lighthouse,” for instance, expects readers to identify its refrain of “Lights, lights, lights” as a line from “Hamlet.” Woolf uses the allusion to weave images of brightness through a narrative that plays with time passing, observing light as an ambiguous flicker in an impermanent world, one that “welcomes and protects,” as Ms. Garber notes, but one that “can also warn of danger if its signals are seen and understood.” “Orlando” (1928) blurs fiction and fact along with time, offering glimpses of an unnamed poet of the Elizabethan age who shows up at Knole, the ancestral estate of Thomas Sackville, who was a Tudor-era forebear of Woolf’s great friend Vita Sackville-West. Sackville was a cousin of Elizabeth I, a statesman and dramatist who co-authored the first English play written in blank verse. By connecting Knole with her shadow-image of Shakespeare, Woolf seduces readers into celebrating a dual aesthetic inheritance that for her represents the heart of Englishness.

Woolf and the other Bloomsbury members counted on Shakespeare’s plays to console and counsel as well as to inspire. In 1904, when young Leonard Woolf traveled to Ceylon to take an administrative post in the colonial civil service, he brought along a miniature edition of the works of Shakespeare and Milton, along with a 90-volume set of Voltaire, as bulwarks of familiarity against his fears of the unknown. Two years later, when Lytton Strachey wrote to Leonard about the shocking death of their mutual friend Thoby Stephen, Strachey relied on “Antony and Cleopatra” to express his grief: “There is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon.”

Clive Bell, a founder of Bloomsbury who never felt entirely accepted by the group, saw the Bard as a token of belonging, telling a paramour who had recently enjoyed an Old Vic staging of “Measure for Measure” that “we, of course, only read Shakespeare.” Keynes parlayed his own veneration into civic munificence, using his government influence as an economic adviser to establish and support funding for the Cambridge Arts Theatre and to oversee the public institution that became, in 1945, the Arts Council of Great Britain.

The members of Bloomsbury defined themselves as modern rebels against the stodginess of Victorian culture. Yet their faith in the primacy of Shakespeare transcended the differences between generations, linking old and new centuries together. After a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1934, Virginia Woolf commented in her diary on the “sunny impersonality” of the playwright’s garden and house, noting that he’s “serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating around one . . . but never to be pinned down.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

Hunting the Falcon

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” So were schoolchildren once taught in order to remember the fate of Henry VIII’s six wives. Anne Boleyn, the second one (that would be “beheaded”), was by far the most interesting and intelligent, the only one of the six who engaged actively in politics, and the only one whom the monstrous Henry ever loved.

To understand Anne’s story it is necessary first to understand Henry, and John Guy and Julia Fox, husband-and-wife authors who have each published previous works of Tudor-era history, give a compelling portrait of Henry in “Hunting the Falcon,” an absorbing chronicle of the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.

As a young king, Henry was intelligent and glamorous but “over-indulged by a doting mother and over-protected by an autocratic father,” the authors write. He grew into “a narcissist who saw exercising control as his birthright, a man who never accepted blame for his own actions and always looked for scapegoats.” The Golden Boy became a sullen, terrifying brute, England’s Stalin.

Anne was neither royal nor noble. She belonged to the rapidly rising gentry class. Her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was a greedy and ambitious public servant, employed sometimes on diplomatic missions, an able man who later proved despicable when his daughter’s fate hung in the balance.

In her youth, Anne was sent to France—a sort of finishing school. There she joined the retinue of Henry’s sister Mary, who had, for reasons of state, been affianced to the “gouty, toothless, libidinous” widower Louis XII. Anne would end up spending seven years in France, much of it at the royal court. She became an accomplished young lady and was always a Francophile, encouraging Henry to ally England with France rather than Spain.

Henry fell in love with Anne not long after her return to England in 1522. Her elder sister Mary had already been Henry’s mistress—Mary is the headliner in Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel, “The Other Boleyn Girl”—but Anne held out for marriage and would do so for several years, a remarkable feat.

As we know from the many popular treatments of this story, a marriage between Anne Boleyn and the king would be possible only if Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon could be annulled. When the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, failed to achieve this end, Anne urged Henry to dismiss him. He needed little urging, but readers of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels will remember that the royal adviser’s loyalty to the fallen cardinal made him Anne’s enemy—even though, in politics and religion, they were as one. Anne favored religious reform, like Cromwell, though she was never a Protestant. She is better described as an evangelical Catholic. According to Anne’s chaplain, the authors write, “her apartments were hives of evangelical piety with her ladies reading the English Bible and sewing clothes for the poor.”

The break with Rome, engineered in part by Cromwell’s management of Parliament, finally made the marriage possible. In sure anticipation of the annulment—delivered by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer—Anne had at last gone to bed with Henry. She was already pregnant when the marriage took place, in January 1533, when the still doting Henry arranged a magnificent coronation for his true and only queen. “Anne was determined,” the authors write, “that everyone who mattered should attend,” though Thomas More chose to stay away, feeling that he couldn’t grace the coronation of a queen “he believed to be living in adultery.” The child proved to be a disappointment, a daughter (the future Elizabeth I), not the son Henry craved.

Anne, the authors stress, was never popular. Some called her a whore and were hanged for their impudence. She was a political power as no previous queen had been, but the security of her position and influence depended on her giving birth to a son. Two miscarriages made her position perilous, all the more so because Henry was wearying of her public activity—she “pushed hard for her people,” Mr. Guy and Ms. Fox write, aiming to fill posts and secure preferments. The adored mistress was becoming a tiresome wife. Henry already had his eye on a replacement, a demure girl named Jane Seymour. He wanted to be rid of Anne.

Cromwell was ready to oblige. Anne had been careless, allowing men to mingle with women in her apartments in the style of the French court. Cromwell first seized Mark Smeaton, a young musician reported to have looked longingly at the queen. Cromwell sent him to the Tower to be tortured. Naturally a confession followed. There were other suspects, among them Anne’s brother, George. Materials for a trial were quickly assembled. Anne’s contemptible father, Sir Thomas, escaped the purge by, as the authors put it, “consenting to condemn her.” Anne, briefly hysterical on first being admitted to the Tower, recovered her spirit, but the trial was a grisly farce, a well-managed show trial.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

Kahlil Gibran: Godfather of the “New Age”

From JSTOR Daily:

In September 1923, Alfred A. Knopf brought out a slim, hundred-odd page volume. The publisher did little to promote it, yet its first print run (some twelve hundred copies) sold out within a month—unheard-of for a poetry volume, then and now.

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was a slow but steadily growing burn, one that has continued, year on year, for ten decades.

Interspersing twenty-six short prose-poetic pieces with original illustrations, The Prophet has made Gibran the third-bestselling poet in history—behind Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. To date, The Prophet has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide (over 10 million in the United States alone) and has been translated into more than a hundred languages.

Yet The Prophet has always been and remains uniquely troublesome, and to call it the bestselling “poetry book” of its century might be misleading. Is it poetry? Or is it (in today’s language) Inspirational Fiction, wisdom text, a spiritual guide of New Age wellbeing or self-help? Perhaps (to deploy a paradox, Gibran’s favorite device) it is all these things and none of them.

Gibran wrote once of his desire “to write a book that heals the world.” The Prophet was that dream’s fruition. Yet his other work—eight English language collections and more books, poems, and other writings in his native Arabic—is largely ignored in the Anglosphere. The Prophet is thus a bestseller with an almost anonymous author. Gibran’s book has outlived him in more than one sense. Though it has had the kind of afterlife of which he himself can only have dreamed, there is in this a strange irony. Gibran was so successful in his likely aim—absorbed into the figure of “The Prophet,” imitating the unknown authors of scripture—that, for many readers and lovers of his book, he remains irrelevant.

Link to the rest at JSTOR Daily

The Forgers

From The Wall Street Journal:

By 1940 the possibility of escape had become so small for the millions of Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe that even the most outlandish-sounding gambit seemed worth a try. One such ploy was to obtain a forged Paraguayan passport. Far-fetched though that plan may have been, the exit papers helped somewhere between 800 and 3,000 Jews flee across Nazi borders and survive the Holocaust.

Put into perspective, that makes the tactic among the most successful wartime efforts to free Jews from the Nazi death machine. (Perhaps the best-known strategy, organized by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, saved approximately 1,200 Jews.) Yet, as we learn in Roger Moorhouse’s valuable but uneven chronicle, “The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation,” for years the Paraguayan-passport scheme remained virtually forgotten. Mr. Moorhouse’s subject thus encompasses a double mystery: how the operation worked and succeeded, and why it seems to have disappeared from the historical record. The author does better explaining the former than the latter.

Of the many threads that weave through the story, perhaps the most intriguing describes the unlikely bedfellows who masterminded the operation: a Swiss-based group of officials from the Polish government-in-exile, working in tandem with Polish-born Jewish community leaders who had found refuge in Switzerland. Then, as now, the very notion of a joint Polish-Jewish humanitarian project can seem surprising against the backdrop of Poland’s long history of often-violent antisemitism. But in numerous documents cited by Mr. Moorhouse, a British World War II historian and the author of “Poland 1939,” the Polish government-in-exile affirmed its intention to protect all Polish citizens, Jewish or otherwise, from Nazi persecution.

The declaration was humanitarian, but the intention was also strategic. Jan Karski—the Polish resistance fighter sent by the government-in-exile on clandestine trips into Nazi-occupied Poland to report on conditions there—warned in early 1940 that Polish antisemitism could “create something akin to a narrow bridge” that would align Polish citizens with Nazi aims and persuade them to collaborate. To counter that, Karski advised building “a common front . . . an understanding that in the end both peoples are being unjustly persecuted by the same enemy.” Karski would later smuggle out his eyewitness accounts of the harrowing conditions in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and at Izbica, the transit camp from which Jews were sent to the Bełżec death camp. He would travel to Washington and London to attest to the mass murder of Jews by cyanide at Auschwitz. To save the Jews of Poland, these reports made clear, additional Allied intervention would be needed.

That help did not arrive. In the breach, the men who would launch the Paraguayan-passports scheme found each other. Their team, called the Ładoś Group, was led by the career Polish diplomat Aleksander Ładoś, who came to the Swiss capital of Bern in 1940 to serve as the unofficial ambassador of Poland’s government-in-exile. In addition to being “positively predisposed toward Poland’s Jewish populations,” Mr. Moorhouse tells us, Ładoś “was not a man overly burdened with respect for the legal sanctity of official documents.” He was the perfect candidate to helm the covert operation.

Rudolf Hügli, a Swiss notary and an honorary consul of Paraguay, would, for a fee, provide the blank passport documents. Joining Ładoś in providing cover for and operating the scheme were three consular colleagues: Stefan Ryniewicz, his deputy; Konstanty Rokicki, whose responsibilities included handling passport applications and often filling in the names of the passport bearers; and Juliusz Kühl, an attaché who himself was Jewish and was the legation’s representative for Jewish affairs.

Kühl became the liaison to several representatives from Jewish aid organizations, most notably Abraham Silberschein, a former member of the Polish Parliament who had helped found the Relief Committee for Jewish War Victims, and Rabbi Israel Chaim Eiss, a founder of the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement. These two community leaders, along with several others, took charge of spreading word of the passport scheme through the ghettos and camps. They also oversaw the coded correspondence used to collect individual information and photos for the fake passports, and managed the passports’ delivery.

After a German spy exposed the scheme in 1943, Swiss authorities arrested or sanctioned most of the group and no more passports were issued. But the documents that had already been distributed still helped some survive, Mr. Moorhouse explains. As the war neared its end, reclaiming soldiers to fight for Hitler took precedence in Germany over vetoing forged passports. And so Germany sought a deal with the Allies to trade German prisoners of war for those Jewish camp inmates who held papers, valid or not, from countries beyond the Reich. Even so, the negotiations were so prolonged that many Jews died while awaiting their release.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

She Reeled Us In With The Odyssey. Now: The Hard Stuff.

From Slate:

Translators often go unsung, but Emily Wilson became a household name with the success of her Odyssey. Since then, readers have been waiting for her Iliad to appear—some with pure excitement, others with skepticism that she could work the same magic again. As Wilson herself acknowledges, translating the Other Epic was not simply a matter of repeating a proven recipe. The Iliad and the Odyssey have both come down to us under the name of Homer, but even ancient audiences recognized them to be very different poems.

Both belong to the ancient epic cycle about the Trojan War and its aftermath. Both also use nearly the same idiom and compositional techniques and feature many of the same characters. (Odysseus and Achilles play important roles in each other’s epics.) Yet while the Iliad is a poem that uses mass human death to explore the nature of immortality—of the gods, and of a hero’s name and deeds—the Odyssey’s tale of survival is a reflection on mortality and its consolations. There are other reasons, too, that the worlds of the two poems seem different. In the Greek epic tradition, Zeus engineered the Trojan War to rid the world of its excess of heroes. In the Odyssey we can feel their absence.

Partially for that reason, ancient critics regarded the Iliad as the finer work. Socrates refers, in the Platonic dialogue Hippias Minor, to a widespread notion that the Iliad is superior to the Odyssey because its star, Achilles, is a manlier man than Odysseus. An ancient critic known as Longinus saw the Odyssey as the composition of an aged Homer who had succumbed to the elderly’s habit of storytelling. “Writing the Iliad at the height of his powers,” Longinus observed, “Homer suffused the whole work with drama and action, whereas the Odyssey is full of stories—just like old age.”

. . . .


Translators often go unsung, but Emily Wilson became a household name with the success of her Odyssey. Since then, readers have been waiting for her Iliad to appear—some with pure excitement, others with skepticism that she could work the same magic again. As Wilson herself acknowledges, translating the Other Epic was not simply a matter of repeating a proven recipe. The Iliad and the Odyssey have both come down to us under the name of Homer, but even ancient audiences recognized them to be very different poems.

Both belong to the ancient epic cycle about the Trojan War and its aftermath. Both also use nearly the same idiom and compositional techniques and feature many of the same characters. (Odysseus and Achilles play important roles in each other’s epics.) Yet while the Iliad is a poem that uses mass human death to explore the nature of immortality—of the gods, and of a hero’s name and deeds—the Odyssey’s tale of survival is a reflection on mortality and its consolations. There are other reasons, too, that the worlds of the two poems seem different. In the Greek epic tradition, Zeus engineered the Trojan War to rid the world of its excess of heroes. In the Odyssey we can feel their absence.

Partially for that reason, ancient critics regarded the Iliad as the finer work. Socrates refers, in the Platonic dialogue Hippias Minor, to a widespread notion that the Iliad is superior to the Odyssey because its star, Achilles, is a manlier man than Odysseus. An ancient critic known as Longinus saw the Odyssey as the composition of an aged Homer who had succumbed to the elderly’s habit of storytelling. “Writing the Iliad at the height of his powers,” Longinus observed, “Homer suffused the whole work with drama and action, whereas the Odyssey is full of stories—just like old age.”

In antiquity the Iliad was not just the favorite of intellectuals, it was also the preferred text for study in schools. Ancient papyri preserving lines from the Iliad outnumber those with text of the Odyssey by a ratio of 3-to-1. At North American colleges in the 18th century, the Iliad was required reading (in Greek). For millennia, schoolteachers thought that Homer’s poem about glory in war offered a better model for young men than his tale of misbehavior and wandering.

Only in the 20th century did the Odyssey definitively surpass the Iliad as the better-known and better-liked epic. Longinus’ complaint that it is too full of stories is probably one of the reasons it is more attractive to modern audiences. The Odyssey can feel more dynamic than the relatively stationary Iliad, its settings and characters more varied. It is also more optimistic about the human condition, or at least its ending is happier (from the protagonist’s perspective).

This is why it was a canny move on Wilson’s part to arouse new general interest in Homer by translating the Odyssey first. The dramatic action of the Iliad precedes that of the Odyssey (and it is likely the Iliad was written down first), but the many ways in which the Iliad differs from the Odyssey are also what make it the more challenging, and now less popular, of the two poems.

Naturally, Wilson’s admirers hoped that her second Homeric translation would be as great an achievement as the first. What they might not have expected is that it would be better.

Link to the rest at Slate

Sublime Neutrality

From Public Books:

I read somewhere that good literature is indifferent to evil. It might have been that good writers are indifferent to evil. I retained none of the context, only the pull quote, and why wouldn’t I? What a seductive proposition—giving readers permission to banish the author, or at least the specter of their moral character; giving writers permission to write without thinking, first, always, what does this say about me?

Literary evil is thin on the ground these days; all those charming pedophiles, sadists, murderers, crowded out by neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters. Look at Dennis Cooper: even snuff is “tender.” You have to meet your reader in the middle. Too much specificity and you alienate your audience, who go from book to book looking for themselves. A popular template from the middlebrow almanac: name a place, throw in trees, quality of light, some vague cultural analysis, no real particulars. In the first person, the speaker invites you to where they are, which is very generous of them. They let you in, and there’s plenty of room in their blousy descriptions for you to bring yourself and everything you already knew. Particularity can be dangerous, even violent, so writers learn to be careful what they ask their readers to relate to. But if the writer knows what they’re doing, relatability doesn’t come into it. The reader has forgotten they exist as a being apart.

Before the publication of his first collection of short fiction, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, Paul Dalla Rosa enjoyed a remarkably slick career for a local short story writer. Who is his agent??? I would seethe, watching his bylines appear in GrantaThe Paris Review, and, most recently, Forever, a magazine so cool I paid $100AUD for it to get lost in the mail. I was surprised he even had an AustLit entry, despite failing to appear in the bloated back-catalogues of print periodicals or obscurely-monied short story competitions, not one weird poem on a glorified blog run by regional cat people. Dalla Rosa has been careful not to embarrass himself.

The stories in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life are set in millennial Carver-country, an abstract zone of aestheticized precarity and terminally online mass culture, where there is no space but private space and hell is ourselves. Reviews of the collection have described its “poise,” “precision” and “elegance.” The stories are written with a calculated reserve, a wry and reflexive humor; they are contemporary without unduly dating themselves, breaking no sweat under anxiety of influence, neither unfashionably literary nor fashionably unliterary, with the author citing Ottessa Moshfegh, Amie Barrodale, Gary Indiana, Lucia Berlin, Eve Babitz, Dean Kissick, Jordan Castro, Honor Levy, Megan Boyle, Chelsea Hodson, and Tao Lin as influences, a North American canon of cool edge. Any dorky, undergraduate-writing-class interest in “place” has been excised. Settings are always threatening to turn into somewhere else (the Gold Coast “felt kind of like California, with theme parks, palm trees and water, but it wasn’t California”). Smartphones blink. People regard each other in terse, empty moments. Technology represents alienation. Sex also represents alienation. Mutual regard is held with roaches, emotionally dysfunctional pets, and Mary Gaitskill, but never other people. The dust jacket claims the book is “tender and unsparing,” and the word tender comes up in more reviews than I bothered to count. In profiles, interviews, and rarefied circles of snobs, the collection’s “deft execution,” “taut” prose, “forensic” detail have been praised. The general view holds Dalla Rosa as that rare and highly-prized thing: a craftsman.

Why is craft such cause for comment? If craft is so remarkable, this must mean that writing badly is not a barrier to publication in Australia, and while nobody wants a reputation for cruelty, failing to say this produces its own contradiction: if “craft” (labor) does not produce “craft” (quality), then the latter is either innate or some transcendental haze that comes over the writer like a spell, possibly after receiving an Australia Council grant. Or, and this is my suspicion, praise of “craft” is primarily bestowed on writers who tend toward a spare, ironic, placeless style; the skill here concerned is the disciplined study of fashionable Americans, who sometimes sound “American” but mostly sound, to their own ears and everybody else’s, neutral.

Americans are freaks, but they represent the imperial centre of Western cultural production and it’s natural to be curious what they get up to. If Dalla Rosa’s reception has a touch of “local lad proves to be no worse than the foreigner”—when he gets called the “real deal” and it bears the same inflection as world class—that is hardly his fault. And Dalla Rosa is writing in a tradition of, for want of a better word, nasty stories, brutal tales told with jaunty elegance, which we perhaps do not associate with the ruddy and simpering national character. Nobody has ever praised the dark glamor of the Wheeler Centre; there is something staid, dismayingly crude, about a literature that counts Murnane among its sexiest cult figures, making some dissociation from the local an understandable position for aspiring stylists. Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gaitskill, thinks writer-character Paul as he turns to sex work in “An MFA Story,” and Bad Behavior certainly looms, ur-text to a strain of fiction that, in its anti-sentimental approach, its “transgressive” subject matter, may court accusations of bad taste but never a failure of self-knowledge. What was transgressive in 1988 is a little pat now; this kind of franchizable cynicism has become familiar, which is not to say, in Dalla Rosa’s case, that it’s poorly done; and, in fact, its very iterability is the binding principle of the collection.

. . . .

Where a novel is an argument, a short story is an axiom. It’s the minor form for a reason. A novelist may have to publish three or four times before revealing that, like the proverbial flat character, they’re essentially possessed by one idea. A short story writer is less lucky; a story lasts just long enough for some central fixation or moral ideology to crystallize before it collapses under the imperative of economythen the gesture must be repeated. This is why short stories can be uniquely frustrating to read and to write; it’s also why they work so well when the prevailing mode is nastiness, bad people doing cruel and stupid things. The fetish figure of a typical short story collection might be the revenant, the same preoccupations returning again and again to be killed off in entertaining ways. Rather than the revenant, we might say, the fetish of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is the Sim.

This motif of the digital puppet pursues the characters across the collection. “The stars indicated I was under the influence of an inverted Mars,” says the narrator of “The Hard Thing,” “which meant I could act like a body possessed.” In “Charlie”:

Emma had begun to see herself as a model in one of her renders, or more so as an Emma avatar in the game The Sims or a Sims Brooklyn expansion pack. Emma’s avatar was a Sim that was playing The Sims to earn money, but that money was only ever enough to keep playing, and, at certain times, upgrade homewares.

At one point, Emma’s brain feels like an overworked MacBook; when she’s angry, her MacBook overheats. Experience in “COMME” is “like a certain kind of YouTube video,” or, for the movie star in “In Bright Light,” like “watching a 2D movie that was now 3D.” In “Contact,” in which a call center worker is automated out of her job, the character views her hallway as “a low-rendered loading screen she must navigate as her apartment buffers.”

Link to the rest at Public Books

There are clues in the excerpts, but PG confirms that the author of the OP is Australian. The OP first appeared in the Sydney Review of Books.

Amazon’s latest actions against fake review brokers: 2 fraudsters found guilty of facilitating fake reviews in Amazon’s store

From Amazon:

Two individual fake review brokers were found guilty of illegal business operations intended to deceive Amazon customers and harm Amazon selling partners through the facilitation of fake reviews. These verdicts are the result of local law enforcement’s investigation and a criminal referral supported by Amazon.

From March 2021 to March 2022, the China-based defendants used third-party messaging applications to advertise and sell fake reviews to bad actors operating Amazon selling accounts. In exchange for a fee, the defendants left fake positive reviews to boost a bad actor’s product ranking, or fake negative reviews to lower the ranking of a competitor’s product.

Following the criminal referral, local law enforcement conducted an investigation and confirmed the review brokers’ illicit activities in Amazon’s U.S. store. The defendants were officially sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and three years of probation in China, marking Amazon’s second criminal judgement of this kind.

“Amazon is pleased to see that these fraudsters are being held accountable for their actions,” said David Montague, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Risk. “The verdicts are a testament to the partnership of local officials in bringing down those who attempt to deceive our customers and harm our selling partners. We look forward to continuing to partner with law enforcement toward the mutual goal of bringing fake review brokers to justice.”

Link to the rest at Amazon

The most impressive part of the OP to PG is that Amazon relied upon local Chinese law enforcement to handle the arrest and whatever trial procedure China uses to punish the fake review scammers.

J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

From The Paris Review:

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

European Publishers Hail Parliament’s Book Sector Report

From Publishing Perspectives:

In its statement today from Brussels (September 14), the Federation of European Publishers notes that today’s adoption by the European Parliament of what’s called the Future of the European Book Sector report is “the first time in 10 years that the parliament has made dedicated recommendations for the [book] sector, in which Europe is a world leader.

As is clear in this briefing from the parliament’s offices, the report is a “bibliographical review” ordered up by the rather direly termed “Cult Committee,” which is the legislative body’s committee responsible for cultural and educational elements of the European Union.

In this briefing’s introduction, we read, “Besides its important cultural value and role, the book sector is an essential economic activity in the EU.

“In 2021, it was assessed as the second cultural activity, right after watching or listening [to] a program, and represented 12 percent of the EU average cultural expense. Still in 2021, it had a turnover of more than €23 billion (US$24.5 billion), 18 percent of it being generated by export (a rate relatively stable over the years).”

This compendium of papers, however, contains nuanced points that get at the caution required in an age of unprecedented dynamics that include—by organizational headers—digital and digitization; ecological considerations; market evolution; diversity and accessibility; COVID-19; and “stakeholders’ points of view.” At various points in this material, you can catch glimpses of the fact that books and publishing exist today in an historically unprecedented competitive environment of electronically produced and distributed entertainment media.

The federation in its statement reflects this, writing that the report, “recognizes the fundamental contribution of the book sector, providing citizens with millions of books to educate and entertain themselves.

“But this contribution relies on key elements which must be defended, even in the EU: including a balanced value chain, freedom of expression, editorial diversity, and independence from state censorship.”

The book sector also has a societal responsibility to fulfill, according to the federation, such as to become greener; provide more accessible books to people with a handicap; or support Ukraine. The report underlines the initiatives already taken by the sector but also highlights the need for further technical and financial support to help publishers in their efforts.”

. . . .

Federation president Ricardo Franco Levi is quoted, saying, “The European Parliament made very important proposals to ensure that Europe remains the world leader of publishing, while facing the many challenges of the 21st Century.”

. . . .

Members of the European Parliament, the publishers write, “call for a stronger place for the book sector in existing EU programs, such as Creative Europe and Horizon—the latter of which having made news last week when the United Kingdom rejoined—to support translation, the circulation of books, innovation, and research.

“The Parliament also calls for national and European initiatives to support reading promotion, such as book vouchers or ‘reading ambassadors.’”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Books and politicians are not PG’s favorite combination.

Amazon’s Latest Actions Against Fake Review Brokers: 2 Fraudsters Found Guilty Of Facilitating Fake Reviews In Amazon’s Store

From Public.:

Two individual fake review brokers were found guilty of illegal business operations intended to deceive Amazon customers and harm Amazon selling partners through the facilitation of fake reviews. These verdicts are the result of local law enforcement’s investigation and a criminal referral supported by Amazon.

From March 2021 to March 2022, the China-based defendants used third-party messaging applications to advertise and sell fake reviews to bad actors operating Amazon selling accounts. In exchange for a fee, the defendants left fake positive reviews to boost a bad actor’s product ranking, or fake negative reviews to lower the ranking of a competitor’s product.

Following the criminal referral, local law enforcement conducted an investigation and confirmed the review brokers’ illicit activities in Amazon’s U.S. store. The defendants were officially sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and three years of probation in China, marking Amazon’s second criminal judgement of this kind.

The Counterfeit Crimes Unit is a global team dedicated to partnering with law enforcement, brands, and other stakeholders to disrupt counterfeiters and their networks.

“Amazon is pleased to see that these fraudsters are being held accountable for their actions,” said David Montague, Amazon’s vice president of Selling Partner Risk. “The verdicts are a testament to the partnership of local officials in bringing down those who attempt to deceive our customers and harm our selling partners. We look forward to continuing to partner with law enforcement toward the mutual goal of bringing fake review brokers to justice.

“Amazon pioneered online customer reviews 25 years ago, and we are committed to ensuring that our reviews remain a trustworthy, insightful resource for customers. Amazon will continue to protect customers, our selling partners, and our stores from fake reviews by investing in proactive tools to detect and stop fake reviews from appearing in our stores. As a result of continued investments, Amazon proactively blocked more than 200 million suspected fake reviews from our stores in 2022, and as of the end of August, we have taken legal action against 147 fraudsters across China, Europe, and the U.S.”

Link to the rest at Public.

Blenheim’s £5M Gold Toilet Heist: 7 Suspects Await Legal Outcome

From Culture.org:

The Case That Flushed Four Years Down the Drain

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your metaphorical plungers because we’re about to dive into the long and winding pipe of the infamous £5 million golden toilet heist at Blenheim Palace. For four years, this crime has mystified investigators, and its audacity has shocked the art world. Now, finally, we might be on the brink of flushing out the truth.

Back in 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan unveiled an art piece that, well, dazzled in the literal sense. It was an 18-carat gold toilet entitled ‘America,’ initially exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Let’s be honest: this toilet was no ordinary John; it was a symbol of opulence, of irony, and it attracted a whopping 100,000 people in New York eager to, ahem, experience it.

The golden spectacle was then relocated to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, strategically placed in a chamber opposite the room where the British Bulldog himself, Winston Churchill, was born. But before anyone could say “seat’s taken,” it was stolen in a high-stakes heist on September 14, 2019, just a day after its grand UK unveiling.

H2: The Hurdles and Whirlpools of a Baffling Investigation

Despite the passage of four years and the arrest of seven suspects—six men aged between 36 and 68, and one 38-year-old woman—the investigative waters have been murky. Not a single charge has been filed. Until now, that is. It seems the cogs of justice are finally turning.

The Thames Valley Police recently submitted a comprehensive file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the organization responsible for pulling the flush, so to speak, on any charges. This move significantly raises the possibility that the seven suspects could soon find themselves in deep water.

Maurizio Cattelan, the mastermind behind the £4.8 million toilet—yes, let’s not forget the 200k difference—initially took the theft with a grain of artistic humor. “Who’s so stupid to steal a toilet? ‘America’ was the one percent for the 99 percent,” he mused. But everyone knows, stealing art is no laughing matter, especially when it’s a toilet that takes on the American Dream, as the Palace’s chief executive Dominic Hare pointed out. The theft didn’t just rob a stately home; it flushed a cultural commentary down the drain.

What Happened to the Golden Throne?

As curious as it sounds, investigators believe the golden toilet was melted down and transformed into jewelry. While not confirmed, this adds another layer of irony to the story—turning an art piece designed for the “99 percent” into an elite object once again, only this time in the form of necklaces and rings.

Link to the rest at Culture.org

PG says the author should have limited herself to fewer garderobe puns.