Books I've actually finished lately: 103

After I publish a text on semiotics, I devote my time either to recognizing what was wrong or to demonstrating that those who did not understand it in the way I meant were misreading it. 

- Umberto Eco

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 99 / This Week's Literary Hero

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere buy in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low-places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship or vice.

- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

John Updike

was rejected, twice, from Harvard's most prestigious creative writing class.

And other matters.

From Hartford to Harvard

you have to have the finances to match.

Marc Sidwell talks up the merits of the day job for the creative mind.

City A.M.'s Opinion pages are a place for thought-provoking opinions and views. These are not necessarily shared by ASH Smyth.

Not an April Fool(?)

Harvard librarians make a point of not going looking for rare volumes bound with human skin.

Horse nonsense

Investigating the facts and stats of the HarvardX Ancient Greek Hero course, I note there is a 'Rules of Online Conduct' point explicitly banning the use of 'trojan horses'.

Literary realities: 2

Why are American novelist-academics who write themselves into novels as American novelist-academics always from small New England humanities colleges? Why do they never say, 'I'm Professor of English Literature at Harvard, I've written 11 highly acclaimed novels, won the Booker, the James Tait Black and the Nobel, had a film made about me and am generally a big swinging dick, so the rest of you can all just fuck off.'?