bookshelves of doom

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too, as performed by Shel Silverstein.

 

More Silverstein videos compiled over at Open Culture.

High school sophomores, a story vending machine, and a legacy of literature.

From Publishing Perspectives:

By the fall, Nic says, the 4th Floor Chapbook Series Vending machine will be elevatored to the top floor of the Science Leadership Academy and open for business. It will offer young adult fiction and poetry from writers all across the country (submissions are still being accepted; more on that here) as well as work from the Science Leadership Academy’s own students. It may be the start of a new trend, or just something organically cool.

Very cool.

Oh, Douglas Adams. I still miss you.

From the Guardian:

A poem written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams, in which the Hitchhiker's Guide author manages to successfully pull off rhyming "futile" with "mute, while", and "exhausted" with "of course did", has been discovered in a cupboard at his old school.

The entire poem is there, so click on through.

I laughed out loud while I was reading it, and then, when it was over, I wanted to cry that we lost him so young.

A few morning links!

• mental_floss: 11 Movies Based on Poems.
• This one's for Josh: J.P. Donleavy is Still Standing.
• At Publishing Perspectives: How to Buy a Top Spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Um, ew.
• At Open Culture, The Hobbit, as imagined by Maurice Sendak:

"Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions."

Ursula K. Le Guin, as always, is The Stuff.

From her interview at The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Might that be why your fiction has been more readily admired in so-called literary circles—that it’s more engaged with human complexity and psychology?

LE GUIN

It’s helped to make my stuff more accessible to people who don’t, as they say, read science fiction. But the prejudice against genre has been so strong until recently. It’s all changing now, which is wonderful. For most of my career, getting that label—sci-fi—slapped on you was, critically, a kiss of death. It meant you got reviewed in a little box with some cute title about Martians—or tentacles.

Also, this killed me: "My father knew Alfred Knopf personally. I’d had recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf when I was seventeen. Blanche—she was a real grande dame, oh God, she was scary. And I’d go in with my little tooter." Like, can you even PICTURE THAT? I can't.

And then later she compares genre fiction to poetry—because in both cases, you're writing within a form—and a response to that "I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real" statement and holy crow, I just want to QUOTE EVERYTHING.

So, yeah. It's an AWESOME interview, not to be missed.

And the challenge to A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl continues.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Aydlett resident Elissa Cooper asked to have "A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl" removed from the Currituck County High School library after her freshman daughter brought it home to read last February.

"My chances may not be very good, but I believe it is a worthwhile argument," Cooper said by phone Friday. "I'm prepared, and I know 100 percent it is wrong."

I loved that book. And I totally predicted that it would not go over well with some parents.

Woo, me.

This Wednesday: Take Your Poet to Work Day.

I love these so much, I can't even:

Click on through to Tweetspeak for a whole bunch more (including Poe and Rumi and Eliot and Teasdale -- I guess I'll have to make my own Stein and Millay!), and a big infographic and all sorts of other good stuff.