Monday linkpharm (books and language):
- More Famous Literary Liars:
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was not actually about himself, but about a blond neighbor boy named Todd. [via]
Absent from his list, however, is about author J.K. Rowling, who apparently also doesn’t exist according to one theory:
A Norwegian film director has sparked a debate in Norway over whether JK Rowling really is the enormously successful author who launched the Harry Potter craze, or whether she’s just a good actress fronted by multinational commercial interests.
But, then again, as I noted here, the latter is a pretty silly theory. Of course, there are always these genuine literary hoaxes [via]
- Dictionary of Antarctic slang [via]
- POW! ZAP! BLAM! ERT! KABLOOIE! WHAMMO! BIFF! ZOWIE! HIKEEBA! TETSUO! Oxnard man reads comic books, brings shame upon family — Mike Sterling’s spot-on send-up of the typical comic-book general interest stories you sometimes see.
- Literary Fiction for People Who Hate Literary Fiction:
There is a stereotype of literary fiction shared by both science fiction readers and non-science fiction readers: that academically-sanctioned, “serious” contemporary fiction is all about dull middle-class people having affairs, and that the writers of this fiction do such things as use a couple hundred pages to describe events that could quite easily be described in a paragraph.[via]
- Crunks ’05: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections:
Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite. [via]
- True excerpts from stories submitted to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine:
Out of the dark void came what looked like a giant rabbit followed by small rabbits which had looked as if they had undergone a mutation with three ears and 2 tails. They discovered they were on Rabbitania. [via]
- Some of nation’s best libraries have books bound in human skin [via]
- The Glamour of Writing [via]
- The Book Bar (the photos of Idiom are also pretty stunning)