ever wonder

"It’s 2068 and Adam Leith Gollner, who half a century ago wrote a bestselling book about fruit hunters, is at a cocktail party where the drinks are resveratrol shakes and the chatter is about memory uploading, genitalia’s new-found obsolescence and stem-cell injections that will allow injured laggards to finish an ultramarathon of the circumference of the moon. […]
     In the course of the book, Gollner visits a former professor, a Jesuit (now suffering from Alzheimer’s – and a stark example, perhaps, of why people become interested in life extension); goes hunting for David Copperfield’s fountain of youth; travels to Esalen, where a psychologist warns him about becoming 'caterpillar soup' on a vision quest; visits a cryogenics lab and meets the proprietor, a man who, within seconds of his wife’s death, began operating on her to prepare her for freezing; and so very much more."
— Lisan Jutras, The Globe and Mail
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dumb down, or dumb up

"[…] Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s forthcoming book, Without Their Permission […] bears a small mark, which indicates that the book is a '5-hour read.' In a picture Ohanian posted of the book on imgur, he adds, 'Hope this becomes a trend — I believe we’re the first book to do it, yes?'

     […] What is the purpose of this sort of thing, I wonder? It certainly isn’t to give you a true idea of what kind of investment is required to read the book. It just can’t be that people think they know exactly how long it will take the average person to read the book. In my anecdotal experience, reading times vary not just by page-length, but also by the difficulty of the prose and the clarity of the author’s thinking. This is a 272-page book, which means the author expects you to read at roughly a page a minute. For most people that would constitute speed-reading […]"
— Michelle Dead, Flavorwire
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"[…] when you see the word 'car', the little voice in your head says 'C-A-R, car'. This sub-vocalization slows reading to a snails pace. To speed read, you must learn to see words as images. You must re-learn to process what you read with the right side of your brain instead of the left side.
     Speed reading is a technique that allows you to take in the printed word just like you take in images while watching a movie. You learn to change how you view words so they are seen as images by the right side of the brain instead of using the voice in your head with the left side. This completely changes how your brain processes information. […]"
— Michael Ford, PositiveArticles
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In situ

"Bless an author with a long enough career, and even the most outcast elements can get a second chance. In Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic, pull-out-the-stops first novel, V. (1963), the Upper West Side merits only a withering dismissal:

     This was on Broadway in the 80’s, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken heart for every light on it. Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it.

     Fifty—fifty!—years later, Bleeding Edge, his latest, situates its heroine, Maxine Tarnow, and much of its action firmly on the 'Yupper West Side.' Though the area retains a rep as 'a vague sort of uptown Dubuque,' Pynchon’s affection for Maxine means the neighborhood gets his signature treatment, three parts laughing gas to one part subterranean profundity."
— Ed Park, BookForum
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slinging hash and other vittles

"The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation 'lb,' for the Roman term libra pondo, or 'pound weight.' Like many standard abbreviations of that period, 'lb' was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde (an example is shown above, right, in Johann Conrad Barchusen’s Pyrosophia, from 1698).
     And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred 'lb' mutated into the abstract #.
     The symbol shown here on the left, a barred 'lb' rendered in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl, is a missing link, a now-extinct ancestor of the # that bridges the gap between the symbol’s Latin origins and its familiar modern form. Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—'hash mark,' 'number sign,' and even 'octothorpe,' a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase 'pound sign' can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as 'lb' came from libra, so the word 'pound' is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance."

— Keith Houston, The New Yorker
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We need you...

Illustration: Michael Hale

Dear friends of, and strangers to, the Elora Writers' Festival.
     It's a new year (for me, the year really starts in September) and now is the time to embellish your connection to this blog spot—and to the Elora Writers' Festival.
     Have you read a wonderful book lately—or a really disappointing one? And need to share your feelings and thoughts about it with the rest of the world?
     Why not post a review of it, here? On our blog spot. What readers think—regular, book-buying readers—is very important to us; you are our audience!
     And if you are a budding writer the formal demands of such a modest project go a long way in improving you writing skills. You will be amazed at what you're really thinking about, what your true opinion of a book is, once you put the Muse into top gear.
     Try it.
     If you don't like it, remember: It's the "shitty first draft" and you should let it get "cold" for a day or two and come back to it later.
     There are no deadlines here. But keep in mind that successful writers learn to impose their own deadlines.

When you're ready, get in touch with us through the blue-framed "Contact Us" box below.

"Happiness is a warm gun..." — Lennon–McCartney

"Sometime in late 1968, Charles Manson was listening to 'The Beatles,' to use the proper name of what’s most often called the White Album, and decided that 'Helter Skelter,' an upbeat rocker about a roller coaster at an English amusement park, was a call to black insurrection in America, to be set off by the brutal murders of an actress, a hairdresser, a coffee heiress, and several other innocents.
     The question that this horrible incident has always provoked was not just: How could anyone have thought anything so murderously insane? It was also: Why was Charles Manson listening with such hallucinative intensity to an album whose other highlights were John Lennon’s delicate bossa-nova ballad to his mother Julia, Paul McCartney’s lyrical invocation of Noël Coward, and George Harrison’s mystical celebration of the varieties in a box of English chocolates[…]
     These questions come to mind in reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s heavily hyped biography Salinger (Simon & Schuster), not least because, in one of the most bizarre sections of a bizarre book, they themselves raise the issue of murder-by-bad-reading, in connection with the murder (fearful symmetry!) of the Beatles’ John Lennon by Mark Chapman, who happened to have hallucinated a motive within The Catcher in the Rye. Shields and Salerno’s own peculiar view of Salinger forces them to insist that Chapman was not just a crazy hallucinant, but in his own misguided way an insightful reader, responding to the 'huge amount of psychic violence in the book.'”
– Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013)

"Author Frederik Pohl, who over decades gained a reputation of being a literate and sophisticated writer of science fiction, has died at age 93. His wife, Elizabeth Hull, said Tuesday that Pohl died Monday at a hospital after experiencing respiratory problems at his home in the Chicago suburb of Palatine. News of his death was first announced by his granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary, in a tweet.

     Pohl wrote more than 40 novels. Two of his better-known works were The Space Merchants, written in the early 1950s with Cyril M. Kornbluth, and 1978's Gateway, a winner of the Hugo Award for science fiction writing. Pohl was a literary agent and editor before getting his own work published in science fiction magazines of the 1930s. He's credited with launching the careers of James Blish and Larry Niven.
     'It is difficult to sum up the significance of Frederik Pohl to the science fiction field in few words,' Pohl's editor James Frenkel said in an obituary released by the family. 'He was instrumental to the flowering of the field in the mid-to-late 20th century, and it is hard to dispute that the field would be much the poorer without his talent and remarkable body of work as a magazine and book editor, a collaborator and a solo author.'"
— Herbert G. McCann, Huffington Post
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