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Good news for the New York students who so brazenly uttered the word vagina during their public reading of The Vagina Monologues:  Their one-day suspensions have been rescinded. 

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I know you've probably read this elsewhere, but I would have to turn in my William Carlos Williams Fan Club membership if I didn't mention that an unpublished Williams poem that has been a treasured heirloom of a Missouri family has been donated to and will be published by Southeast Missouri State University:

Williams wrote “About a Little Girl” in 1921 after diagnosing Michael and Carl Lund’s mother with leukemia when she was 11. Along with his literary career, Williams had a medical practice in Rutherford, N.J.

Lund said Williams was a friend of his mother’s family, and thought after reviewing medical tests that she was likely to die. The poem contrasts a happy, outgoing “angel” of a child with the death he believed would overtake her.

As it turned out, Williams’ diagnosis was wrong and the child, Marian Macy, lived until 2002 — two weeks short of 92. The poem, which Williams signed with his initials, WCW, was passed from Marian’s mother to Marian, then to her two sons.

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Be sure to stop by theBookseller.com and vote for your favorite shortlisted title for The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.  Your choices: 

• Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
• How Green Were the Nazis?
• D. Di Mascio?s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry?An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
• Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
• Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

You can read more about this illustrious prize here.

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Google software engineer Matthew Gray explains his project to "map the world, based on the frequency of its locations mentioned in books."

We've all seen views of the Earth from space, where the numerous pinpoints of light on the ground combine to yield a speckled map of the world. I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

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NSFW:  the Rare Book Room.  Okay, no nudity or strong language or anything that would cause your cube-mate to call you out for having porn up on your screen, unless he or she considers high-quality scans of some of the worlds rarest books to be porn, which for some they may be. 

Comments

[lucina]

allright! i was rooting for those 'v' girls.

although it was sort of surprising that 'vagina' only came up once in their reading. from the little bit i saw of these monologues on hbo, there were v bombs dropping all over the place.

[tom]

what're the odds that this absurd little google map will be white, white, white ...