It's time for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. First conceived at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 in order to "stave off boredom". The inaugural prize was awarded to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press). Other notable winners include: How to Avoid Huge Ships (1992), Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1996), Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way (2010) and Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop (2012). Last year’s winner was The Commuter Pig Keeper. Here are your 2018 finalists: Joy of Water Boiling, by Christina Scheffenacker Jesus on Gardening, by David Muskett Are Gay Men More...
Billy Collins’ book stolen, shot up, then returned
Somebody in Asheville, North Carolina doesn't think too kindly of two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. According to the proprietors of The Captain's Bookshelf someone took a copy of Nine Horses by Collins from the shelf, brought it home, then proceeded to shoot more than 20 shotgun pellets from close range through the book. And if that wasn't enough the book crook also "meticulously defaced in ink" the author's portrait by adding a devil's beard and mustache and blacking out the eyes before returning it to the shelf. The bookshop owners believe "the culprit is not just an irate reader,...
Plan to have poets at Farmers Market in Atlantic City deemed waste of money by some lawmakers
Update: The CRDA has bowed to the pressure and has pulled the plug on the planned poetry readings Atlantic City is having some trouble. The little Las Vegas of New Jersey has seen better days. In the last year alone four of its casinos have closed and 8,000 folks lost their jobs. Clearly that puts pressure on The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), an organization funded by a tax on casino revenue and tasked with running Atlantic City’s Tourism District and promoting economic development. One idea they had to liven things up a bit was to hire some poets...
Poetry on the Trails
April is National Poetry Month. National Park Week is set for April 18-26. What a better way to celebrate both cultural assets then to put some poetry in the parks! For the second year in a row the Port Angeles Library, which is part of the Washington State North Olympic Library System, is teaming up with Olympic National Park to create a series of four self-guided walks in the park featuring poetry scattered throughout the landscape. Poets featured include Emily Brontë, Robert Burns, Raymond Carver, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Percy Shelley and Gary Snyder among others. And if your muse is kindled during your visit you're...
Reference Rot: The dangerous attrition of digital footnotes
Footnotes are a divisive bunch, for some readers they are pure annoyance for others they provide the opportunity to explore the source and offer a potential new window into something of interest. For Noel Coward reading footnotes was like 'having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.' In her piece for History Today, Anna Neima alerts us to the danger of digital footnotes as more and more of scholarly life moves toward the internet. Noting a study by digital library researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who surveyed three and a half million scholarly articles between 1997 and 2012,...