I’m relatively young and relatively hip, and while I know writing those two things down automatically makes one older and more unhip than they were two seconds ago, I categorize myself this way because what I’m about to say might make you assume I’m 70 years old with a permanent sour face and a “Stay Off The GRASS” sign on my sad, unmowed lawn:

I hate the idea of a Kindle.

I will never buy one, and I can’t fathom why anyone else would, either.  At least anyone who works 9-12 hours a day on the computer.

Don’t you people want some time away from that damn screen?! (<–as my mom would say)

Books, while sometimes weirdly expensive, are a luxury.  Their pages are perfectly aligned.  They have a book smell.  Thick ones tell the world that you’re intelligent and focused (or at least good at pretending to be) and thinner ones say that you’re a literary bandit.  A Rumi or Kahlil Gibran volume on your nightstand assures your relationships that you are, indeed, a deep and romantic thinker.  Conversations are started over books being read in coffee shops and on the subway.  Books can be lent or borrowed.  Books take up space.  They’re real.  Something to hold onto when you’re lonely or sitting on a park bench.  Books are a nerdy kid’s best friend.

Plus, when you lose a book, you can just go out and buy a new one without wondering if your bank account is going to hate you.

No one was ever asked out for coffee based on what was on their Kindle.  You can’t see what that hot, mysterious-looking guy is reading on the subway if he has a tiny electric screen shoved in his face.  The selling point of a Kindle is that its lightweight; there’s no feeling proud after you finish page 822 of Moby Dick on a Kindle because there’s no last page to turn.  Read more »

The smallest literary magazine ever? Matchbook Story is a lit mag published inside, you guessed it, a book of matches, with only enough room for a 300-character story.

The longest novels of all time, summarized in 140 characters or less.

Can poetry deter kleptomaniacs?

If you’re a writer, avoid these professions for your day job.

Unexpected literary references in “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” “Looney Tunes,” and other animated TV shows, via.

You’re never too old to start writing. Case in point: an 82-year-old woman has just landed a 3-book deal this week. Take that, infamous “20 under 40″ list.

Here are some stories The Rumpus’s Seth Fischer likes. I like them too.

Image: Bruce Willey.

Some Thursdays ago I attended a TUCR event featuring Linh Dinh, a poet, short fiction writer, and photographer, who resides in Philadelphia.  I was struck — as often a convincing writer can do — by Dinh’s seeming command of the language of his work, his assuredness as he clambered over the sometimes jarring terrain of his words, which words were in a language not his first.  ”Command,” in fact, may be misleading.  Say instead the speech embodied him, his entire form taking on the stature of his speaking.  Say he was possessed, a shifting sculpture of the sound.  Suffice it to say, a person could tell he spends time reading his own work aloud.

Before him, conversely, read a graduate student, who mumbled his poems as if simply trying to get them out of the way.  I’m sure, of course, there were nerves involved.  We were in a lecture hall, though as such it seemed small, and the seats were well filled with many new eyes, including my friend’s and mine.  And yet, there was a certain discomfort, it seemed, with the words themselves —  strangeness, as in the recognition of an old acquaintance with whom, at one time, one was dear friends — by which roundabout way I mean, he wasn’t quite embracing the work he wrote. Read more »

The blogosphere has lately been all a-flutter about Twitter. Twitter poetry! Twitter book clubs! Twitter books (“Twitterature,” perhaps?)! Twitter ghost writers!

Wait, what? Read more »