Bookninja

Library Journal offers you some Library pr0n.

Could a network of students writing and critiquing each other’s fan fiction help improve literacy and writing skills nationwide? “Does grey have 50 shades?” asked Kirk, his Tribble throbbing as he gazed deep into Harry’s scar-bedazzled eyes. “Why don’t we find out?” countered Harry, dropping his robe and reveal his Dobby. Their quivering lips were almost touching when Katniss entered and offered herself as tribute.

We believe distributed mentoring could be used to help improve formal writing education in schools. The most recent report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicated that 73% of US students in grades 8 and 12 lack proficiency in writing. Research has shown that writing skills can improve significantly during adolescence, and the popularity of writing fan fiction in that age group shows what an opportunity there is to use it as a learning tool.

Students with similar interests from school districts across the country could be connected with one another to get and give anonymous or pseudonymous feedback on their writing. Teachers could moderate the channels to ensure that feedback was constructive, as well as helping students learn from it.

On being a writer and a [insert wishes here]. When I worked in marketing I used to soothe myself with thoughts of Eliot and others who worked as insurance execs/bankers/etc. but also managed to write poetry. Of course, these folks lived in a time with a better work/home divide, mostly had subservient partners who did everything everything around the house, including the kids, and had no digital world to vie for their free time. Now that I am working on an arts grant, I DO get more done, but not so much that it makes up for the loss of income. Of course, if I were getting paid like a university president, I would likely complain less. All I want is a job I can go into each day and not feel like I need a shower at the end. My last two were like that. Gross. Oh, and I want to get paid like an airhead instagrammer. How about that?

I currently work as a college president. I also write poetry. If I had true courage, I used to tell myself, I would be “only a poet.” But I don’t say that anymore, since after much introspection I have accepted the fact that I love to build and make things, including institutions. Despite all of the criticisms (both deserved and undeserved) that have been leveled at liberal arts education these past few decades, it’s still one of the best gifts American culture has given to the world. I am daily inspired to lead a liberal arts college, with all the academic politics, long term resentments, and bureaucratic entanglements such work entails.

I bet a number of people are contemplating today what a world with less work in it would look like. Pour vous:

The suspension of effort can clear a space for long-denied fixations or frustrations—Woolf’s anger, my hunger for success—to reveal themselves. In our stretches of idleness, we are released from external demands to work and to produce. But the appetites that structure our unproductive moments—ambition, lust—impose their own demands. Samuel Johnson, one of the most prolific and ambitious writers of his age, was terrified of his own propensity to idle procrastination and abhorred as a vice “the progress of life retarded by the vis inertiae,” heaping scorn upon those “whose whole labour is to vary the posture of indulgence, and whose day differs from their night, but as a couch or chair differs from a bed.”

Probably all the tail. The world loves us sexy, rugged folk. (Well, with a few notable and reasonable exceptions, especially here at home.) In his own words at CBC.

God, am I ever sick of losing the shine off people I admire to their terrible actions, decisions, and commentary. Worse still, are those who double down on their misguided actions citing some sort of ethical code. I’m looking at you, Peggy. Until this, I had thought GEC a bastion of progressive thinking and acting. According to this article, he is stubbornly choosing the side of a murderer (WHO SERVED ONLY THREE YEARS?!!?!) of an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. Please say this isn’t so. Fix it, GEC, and apologize profusely. This isn’t an opportunity for a hypothetical case study in censorship or artistic merit versus authorial history; it’s you grinding a community’s face into the open wound of a hate crime murder that went underpunished, IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITY. Fucking 20C French criticism has death-of-the-author’d us into a generation that thinks personal accountability has no place in literature. I call bullshit.

The University of Regina says it won’t cancel or censor a lecture by renowned Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke simply because he edited poetry written by convicted killer Steven Kummerfield, who beat an Indigenous woman to death in Regina 25 years ago.

The lecture, scheduled for Jan. 23, and a lack of consultation with Indigenous groups in advance of it, has now become so contentious that it has triggered resignations, calls for a boycott and pleas from some faculty and student groups to cancel or postpone the talk.

In 1995, two white, middle-class, young men — Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky — lured Pamela George, 28, a single mother who occasionally sold sex to help support her children, outside the city, beat her to death and then bragged about it.

We lost some big names and some close names last year. A few people here I knew well and personally. It’s a hard list to look at, but it’s good to see some of their faces again. We have several origami butterflies made by Wayson in a shadowbox here in the house. Will miss Patrick as well, and I know Teva was a good friend to many of you. And Graeme was a genuinely sweet and generous man.

This is a year end list I can get behind. What words or phrases would you add to the list? Ok Boomer also made the list, but I’m not ready to let that one go yet. (from Inside Higher Ed.)

The most nominated word or phrase for 2020 was quid pro quo.

Several word that made the list were “words that attempt to make something more than it is,” Lake Superior State said. Among those on the list: artisanal, curated and influencer.

Other words or phrases were banished for “pretentiousness or imprecision.” Among them were literally, I mean, living my best life and mouthfeel.

Turns out she’s supporting a TERF type who got canned for being a bigot. Gross. Too bad, because I was really coming to admire her. Just let people be who they want to be, for the love of God.

J.K. Rowling, the creator of the “Harry Potter” series, was criticized by gay and transgender rights groups on Thursday after she expressed support for a British researcher whose views on transgender people were described by a court as “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

The researcher, Maya Forstater, lost her job last year at a think tank in London and filed a lawsuit earlier this year alleging discrimination based on what she called her “gender critical” views, which she has expressed often on Twitter. Among them is the belief, which Ms. Forstater tweeted on Wednesday, that “it is impossible to change sex.”

So this pinged on my radar mostly because he disparages The Lord of the Rings. As someone who has read virtually everything Tolkein has written for popular consumption, and who is also currently balls-deep in writing his own fantasy book based on intricate world-building, unique magic systems, and etc, I both fear and loathe any suggestion that what I’m at is anything but high literary art. I mean, it’s not, but you don’t have to say it.