Some poems and a review of my last book, Spyglass Over The Lagoon (The Knives Forks And Spoons Press).  I don’t know what’s in the review since I haven’t received my contributor’s copy but I ‘ve been told it’s highly complimentary. More later.

Poetry Salzburg Review.

Third of The Poetry Hits from Pocket Venus, your dose of spoken poetry: here.

Second in the series at Audioboo here.

WITHIN THE CAMERA FRAME we see a block of text the size of the Empire State Building smashing its way through lower Manhattan. A writhing tangle of poetic lines reaches out and grabs a pedestrian reader, lances a billboard, and masticates a movie theater playing MI3: Ghost Protocol. A member of the graduate faculty averse to dealing with texts she can’t explicate, contextualize, psychoanalyze, or deconstruct runs into the frame, turns to the camera, and gives a piercing scream. It’s the Attack of the Difficult Poems!

Source:  Joshua  Weiner in Los Angeles Review of Books.

An Audioboo.

Yep, should have known that wouldn’t embed.

Go here.

In 2002, on a Friday, Larry Page began to end the book as we know it. Using the 20 percent of his time that Google then allotted to its engineers for personal projects, Page and Vice-President Marissa Mayer developed a machine for turning books into data. The original was a crude plywood affair with simple clamps, a metronome, a scanner, and a blade for cutting the books into sheets. The process took 40 minutes. The first refinement Page developed was a means of digitizing books without cutting off their spines — a gesture of tender-hearted sentimentality towards print. The great disbinding was to be metaphorical rather than literal. A team of Page-supervised engineers developed an infrared camera that took into account the curvature of pages around the spine. They resurrected a long dormant piece of Optical Character Recognition software from Hewlett-Packard and released it to the open-source community for improvements. They then crowd-sourced textual correction at a minimal cost through a brilliant program called reCAPTCHA, which employs an anti-bot service to get users to read and type in words the Optical Character Recognition software can’t recognize. (A miracle of cleverness: everyone who has entered a security identification has also, without knowing it, aided the perfection of the world’s texts.) Soon after, the world’s five largest libraries signed on as partners. And, more or less just like that, literature became data.

Source: Los Angeles Review of Books.

Advocates of international education are ringing alarm bells about a €90 million shortfall in the Erasmus budget. Erasmus, a European Union program, provides grants for students to study or work outside their home countries in one of 33 participating nations (the 27 member states of the European Union, plus Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey). More than 231,000 students received grants in 2010-11, with the average award being a modest €250.The most popular destinations were Spain, France and Germany.

Source: Inside Higher Ed.

All of it on Ubuweb.

The Bodley Head Essay Competition is open to anyone aged between 18 and 35.  Closing date 18 November.

The prize is £1,000 and publication.

Here for full details.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.