I just love this coffee table made from an old library card catalog! Though, I’m not very handy, I will totally copy this if I ever see a wood card catalog for sale. -marcia
Card catalog table on Craft
A high school librarian’s daughter illustrated a graphic-novel version of Macbeth. You know, the Scottish play. By that Shakespeare guy. He mentioned it as his pick in the library’s newsletter and put some copies on a library display table (giving free copies to some students). An ethics board decided he had abused his position as a civil servant, fining him $500 and making him sign a three-page admission of guilt.
“There are so many things going on they could investigate,” he said in an interview, “and they had nothing better to do than allege that my daughter would have gotten 20 cents in royalties if someone bought the book. But nobody did. I gave out free copies. I was just so proud of my daughter for writing it.”
HarperCollins has tossed another vegetable into the social networking salad with Authonomy. Here’s how it works: Take your unpublished or self-published book (or part thereof) and upload it to the site. Then other members read, rate and comment upon your work. HarperCollins says once the site is running full speed, it will read the most highly rated manuscripts in search of “talented writers we can sign up for our traditional book publishing programmes.”
My immediate reaction was cynicism and an audible “ick” noise. I don’t know. I just don’t buy that HarperCollins takes these submissions seriously or that anyone of merit is on there. Also, it seems like it is a way to publicize ideas that may be safer left private or shared with trusted professionals rather than shared with the possibly desperate competition. Also also, I sometimes get all anti-Kumbaya at the prospect of social networking, reality-TV-style competitions and online “communities.” But I am kind of a grump.
Pretending I’m not a grump, I came up with this list of reasons why other people might like it: (Read on …)
Some Nobel Prize official thinks the U.S. is “too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.” So I guess we’re not going to see any American Nobel Prize winners while this guy is involved in the prize.
Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.
“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”
It’s hard to take this seriously when this prize is so political it gives Al Gore a win because, I surmise, they want him to run for president. Also, the Nobel Prize has a long history of picking forgettable writers, not to mention overlooking important writers like Joyce and Nabakov.
That said, he has one good point: we are too sensitive to the trends of our own culture. I blame marketers. I really do. At some point, this trend of buying books based on what marketers think will sell is going to hurt the overall quality of American literature. It forces good writers to write to what marketers want rather than what is important. Marketers, unfortunately, rarely know what they want. So, as insulting as this is, maybe we Americans should take some notice here.
~ Joy