tingilinde

the day for some jean shepherd

(the book is better, but this will do)

 

on the perception of animals

A piece by Elizabeth Kolbert just before the publication of Ed Yong's An Immense World.

snip

...

“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel insisted. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate.” The question “What is it like to be a bat?,” he concluded, is one that people will never answer; it lies “beyond our ability to conceive.”

Yong’s response to Nagel, who makes several appearances in his pages, runs along the lines of “Yes, but . . .” Yes, we can never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat (or for a knifefish to be a knifefish). But we can learn a lot about echolocation and electrolocation and the many other methods that animals use to sense their surroundings. And this experience is, for us, mind-expanding.

...

 

 

may 10, 1933

 

The German Student Association, in collaboration with Goebbels, began a five day "cleanse" of libraries, bookstores, and institutions of books for students deemed not conducive to the character of the German Volk.   After the first purge they moved on to larger scale purges and burnings.

 

neil gaiman on books and reading

the white hot hate of the right-wing

On book bannings.

.

 

 

for kids facing library bans

The Brooklyn Public Library is offering free eCards to teens nationwide,

snip

...

“Access to information is the great promise upon which public libraries were founded,” said Linda E. Johnson, President and CEO, Brooklyn Public Library. “We cannot sit idly by while books rejected by a few are removed from the library shelves for all. Books UnBanned will act as an antidote to censorship, offering teens and young adults across the country unlimited access to our extensive collection of ebooks and audiobooks, including those which may be banned in their home libraries.”

The card will be good for one year and is designed to complement access to resources for teens in their local communities. The Brooklyn Public Library eCard provides access to 350,00 e-books; 200,000 audiobooks and over 100 databases. Teens will also be connected to their peers in Brooklyn, including members of BPL’s Intellectual Freedom Teen Council, to help one another with information and resources to fight censorship, book recommendations and the defense of freedom to read.

...

 

 

john mcphee

On one of my favorite writers..  the best creative non-fiction imho

snip

...

“In the grand cosmology of John McPhee,” writes Sam Anderson, “all the earth’s facts touch one another—all its regions, creatures, and eras. Its absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren, and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time.”

McPhee’s found connections and juxtapositions, entanglements and familial resemblances, influences and complications, analogies and reverberations hint at the ever-yearned-for major complex weave of the universe. Our spot as spiders, though not necessarily at the center of the web—for McPhee, unlike some contemporary purveyors of the personal essay and the memoir, is no narcissist—is somewhere among those silk-spun cables, simultaneously the weavers of meaning and the ones for whom this has been woven.

...

 

 

a conversation with margaret atwood

Erza Klein and Margaret Atwood.

transcript here

 

 

useful comic

Oh Pooh

 

 

bookmaking

the physical process