A new survey from the University of Wisconsin (Whitewater) ranks America’s 64 largest cities by their literacy “quotient.” The magic number is crunched from U.S. census data, newspaper circulation rates, library resources, and number of booksellers, among other things. The top city? Minneapolis.
Unsurprisingly, L.A. isn’t in the top 10 or even the top 20. It’s at number 54, tied with Toledo, Ohio (gulp.)
Baghdad blogger Salam Pax has just signed with Atlantic Books in the UK for a book which is described in this report as the “ultimately embedded” account of the invasion of Iraq. Oh, and if you’re an agent who happened here from Salam’s site, feel free to email me.
The very term might seem like an oxymoron to some people, but Adam Hirsch deconstructs the myth in this Slate article, where he argues that L.A.’s lit image is the creation of non-indigenous writers:
“Again and again, writers with the briefest experience of Los Angeles use it as a blank screen on which to project their own fantasies, prophecies, and fears. For Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust, it was famously a “dream dump,” a “Sargasso of the imagination” in which civilization is reduced to “plaster, canvas, lath and paint.” For Truman Capote, it was a nightmare city where “a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.” And those are some of the milder opinions. (…)
What did Los Angeles do to deserve all this? Writing Los Angeles makes the answer clear: Although it is the second-largest city in America, in the literary imagination it is still a colony. Instead of speaking for itself, the city is spoken about.”
Read L.A. Without a Map.
Zadie Smith writes about Katharine Hepburn in this essay for the Guardian.
“A former dot-commer working a McJob was listening to some headbangers while laying out the last of his dead presidents for longnecks and some less than heart-healthy Frankenfood.” Read this article on new words that have been added to the dictionary.
Aleksandar Hemon and Colum McCann chatted by email about imagination vs. experience and a bunch of other stuff. The Guardian’s transcripts. (First in a two-part series.)
Update: read Part II here.