The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.
via Why I Still Write Poetry by Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books.
Textbooks are a thing of the past, says the common wisdom. Well, the common wisdom of the Technorati maybe. The problem with that thinking is that the number one publisher in the world is Pearson, a textbook publisher, who brought in $7.75 billion in 2009.
Pearson, as Tim Carmody noted in a January Wired article, owns 50 percent of the Financial Times, as well as the number two trade house: Penguin. The second largest textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, owns Standard and Poor’s. To say textbooks are big business is like saying bullets are ouchie.
So writing the obituary for textbooks would be putting the cart before the horse. But pretending like they are not changing their shape, if not their nature, is to proclaim, from one’s buggy, that automobiles are a passing fad.
Future U: The stubborn persistence of textbooks | Ars Technica.
Celebration of Biographers Month
May 16, 1763 is the anniversary of the meeting, at London, England of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, beginning history’s most famous biographer-biographee relationship. Boswell’s books are regarded as models of biographical writing. May 16th is recommended as one on which to start reading or writing a biography yourself. Come join us and learn more at the Todd Library during the month of May.