For all those who believe they do not need help with your writing, I present Tim Park’s argument for what an editor can do for you:
The editor’s job then becomes one of helping the writer to see where an unessential, perhaps unconscious departure from the norm is actually draining energy away from places where the text is excitingly unconventional. That is, the editor reminds an author that to construct a coherent identity he has to remember his relationship with society and with the language we share and cannot express ourselves without. To go out on a limb linguistically, accepting no compromise and creating an idiolect that really is entirely your own, may win awed admiration, as did Finnegans Wake, but will likely not attract many readers, and arguably does not allow for the communication of nuance, since all the ordinary reader will understand is that you are indeed off on a trip on your own…
In Praise of the Language Police by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
“Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: An indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay”
Amen.
The North West London Blues by Zadie Smith | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
Interviewed after winning England’s Costa Prize for Literature in late January, the distinguished novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper. In his Man Booker Prize acceptance speech last October, Julian Barnes made his own plea for the survival of printed books. Jonathan Franzen has also declared himself of the same faith. At the university where I work, certain professors, old and young, will react with disapproval at the notion that one is reading poetry on a Kindle. It is sacrilege.
E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
A look at the news and events happening in the Libraries at Waubonsee Community College