Do you have a hankerchief?

So, remember when they announced that Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and everyone was like, “Who? I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE NOBELS EXCEPT OBAMA OMG WTF?!?” I’m glad we’ve stopped talking about that.

Anyway, Müller’s acceptance lecture is here, and it is the most beautiful thing I’ve read in a long, long time, and I think you should read it too. Here’s a little piece:

“During the time that I was a staircase wit, I looked up the word STAIR in the dictionary: the first step is the STARTING STEP or CURTAIL STEP that can also be a BULLNOSE. HAND is the direction a stair takes at the first riser. The edge of a tread that projects past the face of the riser is called the NOSING. I already knew a number of beautiful words having to do with lubricated hydraulic machine parts: DOVETAIL, GOOSENECK, ACORN NUTS and EYEBOLTS. Now I was equally amazed at the poetic names of the stair parts, the beauty of the technical language. NOSING and HAND—so the stair has a body. Whether working with wood or stone, cement or iron: why do humans insist on imposing their face on even the most unwieldy things in the world, why do they name dead matter after their own flesh, personifying it as parts of the body? Is this hidden tenderness necessary to make the harsh work bearable for the technicians? Does every job in every field follow the same principle as my mother’s question about the handkerchief?”

reading at work

I always feel really guilty when I open up my Google Reader on a weekday morning and see that my Books column has 15 or 20 new posts, because this usually means Bookslut’s new issue is out, and I will be postponing my productivity that day. Not guilty enough to stop reading book reviews at work, of course. Just guilty enough to feel bad about it. There are some really great reviews here, often of books I haven’t heard of, and Jessica’s blog on the site is also fantastic.

If you are similarly tempted by interesting book sites, I also recommend The Second Pass. I just discovered it this weekend, and although it seems pretty new, there’s a lot of good browsing. I particularly like the Backlist feature, which covers older books that still deserve a read. My favorite features so far are this very personal take on Nabokov’s Lolita, a note on the “Ten Best Books of 1709” (yes, you read that right), and this set of blogs with letters from artists/writers. Enjoy.

Against our vanishing

The last of the Polaroid film, which the company stopped making last year, expires next month.

The Observer Review had a few artists take a few final shots with the film. These are by Sam Taylor-Wood

In 1981, Allen Grossman wrote in The Sighted Singer, ”I am convinced that the greater function of poetry (if there can be a greater function than to bring people into discourse one with the other) is the keeping of the image of persons as precious in the world…Really, a question of great moment is the following: does poetry have a function left that is not usurped by other means of transmission of images across time? We live in a world which is flooded with images, images which flow as it were through the hands of Thomas Alva Edison toward us from sources unanticipated by the great poetic makers, who felt that they held in their hands the privilege of conferring visibility, or withdrawing it even from the great heroes. I think no discussion of the function of poetry now should get farther than we have gotten without considering this usurpation of the function of transmitting images by other media.”