Year: 2020

If my inbox is any indication, lots of people who either didn’t used to read poetry or said-they-did-but-actually-didn’t, are starting to pick up those skinny, $20 books out of either sheer boredom.

BookRiot offers some basics on reading and reviewing:

If you’re a student or new reviewer first approaching the task, you may be wondering how to write a poem analysis. Fortunately, there are concrete steps you can take to analyze a poem or collection of poetry. Even if you do not plan on learning how to write a poem analysis essay, building a routine of analysis into your poetry reading can deepen your appreciation for the genre.

Poems have many layers of meaning. A particularly beautiful and well-crafted poem only becomes more enjoyable the more you increase your understanding of the decisions the poet made to craft it. The following steps outline the kinds of questions to ask yourself while writing a poem analysis.

While The Millions looks a little deeper:

More than rhyme and meter, or any other formal aspect, what defines poetry is its self-awareness. Poetry is the language which knows that it’s language, and that there is something strange about being such. Certainly, part of the purpose of all the rhetorical accoutrement which we associate with verse, from rhythm to rhyme scheme, exists to make the artifice of language explicit. 

A psychologist explains why it’s so hard to concentrate on reading right now. (Dudes, just pay me $75, half of what a psychologist will charge you, and I’ll tell you all the same things, but without an education to back it up. I may also throw in a free hug.)

Something I’ve heard quite often during the pandemic is, “I can’t read anymore.” That’s mostly because I write a recommendations column where I match people with books to suit their moods, and the mood a lot of people are in right now is “terrified, angry, and sad,” which makes it hard for them to focus on anything, even a book.

For people who are used to self-soothing with a favorite novel, the inability to read is a loss. A small loss, given the scale of tragedy we are all dealing with right now, but a loss nonetheless. So I wanted to find out more about why the state of constant anxiety so many people are living in has left a lot of us unable to read.

You know, every now and then these sorts of articles come up and for people like me they are cathartic tragedies. Look, some people turn to movies-of-the-week or Hallmark for their sappy, weepy fare. I read stories about people giving up their books. Speaking of which, what will happen to the thousands of poetry books I have collected over the years when I finally decide I need less space to live in? Well, hopefully my grandkids won’t tear them up for wallpaper. But maybe that’s not a bad idea. I used to go to an Irish bar on West 4th in NYC before the KGB readings — Swift, after Jonathan — and they’d decorated the can by shellacking pages from the novels to the walls. So as you were standing there pissing out your expensive pint from Sean, you’d end up fondly rereading some passage or another. I made a point of visiting all the urinals, over time. The Irish really know how to jerk the nostalgia chain.

If there’s a silver lining to living in virtual lockdown, it’s this: Plenty of time to attack those lists of “things we should do around the house.” Which is how we came recently to complete a book purge, ultimately donating 27 boxes to a used bookstore, getting rid of six overflow bookshelves in the garage and moving two others back into the house. Now, for the first time in two decades, we can park in our two-car garage.

It was a bittersweet experience. With the bitter outweighing the sweet.

Halfway there, my weekday sober friends. We’re closing in on Friday when you can get yourself tanked enough to forget about the shitty state of the world for a few hours. Why does Friday even matter anymore? Don’t ask that question. It’s because we are the keepers of the flame of civilization. We will take the ideals mask-wearing self-restraint and carnal-forbearance into the future populated by day-drunk, track-pant-wearing. bad-hair-having post-apocalyptic mutants. We’re heroes, you and I. Heroes.

• RIP: Caroline Reidy, CEO of S&S, dead at 71;
• Some exciting writers like Doyali Islam and Téa Mutonji shorlisted for Trillium Awards;
• Librarians on frontlines of Covid information collation;
• Latest Elena Ferrante goes straight into the Netflix meat grinder;
• Also in Netflix: Iron Man is adapting a Canadian comic artist’s story;
• Been Shirley Jackson time lately… Here’s a nice meaty piece;
• ‘Member Don Quixote in space? All the best things come from the 70s;
• Kiddie cartoon dog named Bluey wins AU’s top book prize;
• Spend a little time with Northrop Frye (via Ninja-reader C-Money);
• Harper Collins is really fighting this whole thing;

Poet and novelist Gary Barwin performs some thought experiments every morning to cope with everything. He’s basically a smart guy who does a lot of strange thinking that I admire. So go read.

I’ve recently learned — too much — about how we all radiate moistly, a giant web of moistness spreading madly off in all directions.

But I’ve also learned that we radiate connection, too. We humans are communication specialists. Interaction technologists. Even the most introverted of us. We send and receive thoughts, feelings and experiences like some kind of fleshy modem. I feel like a single penguin thinking about being huddled together with a thousand other penguins. At least that’s what it says on my dating profile. 

But by sending and receiving, we know where we are. We know who we are. Even if it means we’re someone who has forgotten to get out of pyjamas or brush our hair.

I’ve been calling this “conscious community.”

A new, young, black administrator reveals why things are changing. On a personal note, the working American poets I am most fascinated by are queer poets of colour, like Carl Philips, Jericho Brown (who won this year), Eduardo Coral, Ocean Vuong, etc.

When scrolling through this year’s list of Pulitzer Prize recipients, one thing immediately stands out: the sheer number of Black winners. There is The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s devastating fictional account of the true story about life at the Dozier reform school, which won for fiction. A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson’s semi-autobiographical musical about an aspiring playwright trying to write a musical about an aspiring playwright, secured the win for drama. The Tradition, Jericho Brown’s heartfelt collection, won the prize for poetry, while The Central Park Five, Anthony Davis’s spellbinding opera about its titular group of wrongfully convicted Black and Latinx boys, took home the prize for music. Add to that wins for Nikole Hannah-Jones, who took home the commentary prize for her contributions to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” as well as a special award for the late investigative journalist and Civil Rights leader Ida B. Wells, and it’s clear that Black art was finally getting its due.

It’s something to be proud of for Dana Canedy, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prize since August 2017. As the first woman, first person of color, and youngest person to ever hold the position, the former New York Times editor has spent the past three years painstakingly working to diversify this prestigious organization in all facets. And while her contributions have been apparent from the very beginning—it was after she took the role that Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. took home the 2018 Pulitzer for Music, after all—nothing has felt quite like the 2020 results.

• Boris Johnson’s dad gets book deal with… Omg. What a screaming-nuthouse shitshow this is going to be;
• Don’t cry for Bologna (60,000 people show up online);
• Great: Japan gets Haruki radio show, we just get racist Bryan Adams;
• British Library asks kids to record lockdown in tiny books;
• There’s a strong moral code in Jackie Collins? She’s practically a no-kiss-rule Pretty Woman;
• Little free libraries are all the rage;
• Graphic novel sales soar;
• Canadian comics awards go out;
• Some Canadian poetry awards also went out!;
• What’s the best book you ever read for school?;
• Every now and then I think, “What dark magic fuckery is this?” but I know it’s something some of you might understand, so I link to it;
• Emma D delivers lockdown lessons from The Room;
• Donate your unwanted Zoom background decorations to libraries;

So, the numbers are coming in for the first quarter in publishing and they’re not as terrible as one might think. But look, up there above you: it’s the other shoe, and it’s about to drop. Actually, it’s an anvil being hauled up by a rope for some reason. No, wait, it’s a steel safe. I stand corrected, it’s a piano. A grand piano. Right over your head. Now we have reached full tragicomic potential. But is there hidden opportunity in here?

In the days before the lockdown began, Waterstones reported a 17% uplift in sales, a rise that has only grown in the weeks since; a central irony, for publishers, has been that in the moment when books have been suddenly more difficult to get hold of, demand for them has never been higher. A recent survey suggested that 40% of people say that books have helped them get through the lockdown. All publishers report a dramatic increase in traffic on their websites, and in ebook and audio sales. Online sales at Waterstones are growing 30% each day; as I write they are up some 1,500%, a long line of Royal Mail trucks queuing outside its warehouse every night, where there used only to be one. “It’s still a relatively small proportion of the sales that were coming out of our shops,” says Daunt. “But hopefully, customers can now see that online is not a monopoly.” Publishers are unsurprisingly thrilled by this. Can Amazon’s monopoly be broken? “One thing that must come out of this is a model where online selling is more plural,” says Stephen Page.

I read this fascinating piece over the weekend about tracking down the story of some real-life school kids stranded on a rock in the ocean for 15 months. Turns out no one died or got beat to death (it’s always the redheads that get it, poor Simon) or had their brains spilled after someone said “Sucks to your assmar.” In fact, they handled it quite well and were little gentlemen to the end. The Lord of the Flies was the book in grade 9 that taught me what “symbolism” was, in its sort of heavy-handed way (which is what 14 year olds need, really), and I still love the book. It helped me throughout life to think: be more like Ralph, less like Jack (another redhead… we’re only good for killing and being the bad guy, apparently). But, as a kid who grew up during the Reagan admin and who thought he’d have to one day preside over a tribe of wasteland warriors eking out a life in the harsh desert of destroyed rural Ontario, I did think it was wise to keep a few Jack moves in my back pocket. Turns out you just need to be stranded only with other Ralphs to make it work. Throw a Jack in there and shit will hit the fan (made of palm leaves and coconut batteries, I’m sure).

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip … Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

(Read: most awards) The Baffler takes on the Pulitzers and cronyism in journalism. Huh, so you’re saying that awards don’t always go to the most deserving individuals and that the game is rigged against certain people? Never considered that here at Bookninja.

It is not an entirely new criticism. As J. Douglas Bates wrote almost thirty years ago in his book The Pulitzer Prize: The Inside Story of America’s Most Prestigious Award, the prizes are a product of cronyism and mutual benefit; the prizes elevate the publications, and vice versa. Bates noted that the Pulitzer board of directors would change from time to time, but that when there was turnover, it was usually “white, male, senior journalists” being “replaced by more white, male, senior journalists.” The board chooses the jurors for the prizes each year. And though there is more diversity on the board and among jurors (the board is led by the eminent Elizabeth Alexander, head of the Mellon Foundation) than there was when Bates wrote his book, a cursory look at the Pulitzer board reveals precisely the incestuous relationships that make it all possible. The current list includes David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker and the very man who hired Taub to work at The New Yorker in 2017, two years after he finished graduate school.

Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.