• The contents of Osama Bin Laden’s bookshelf were revealed recently. It may come as no surprise to you that the murderer of thousands has a dismal VIDA count. Of his English language collection, only four of the writers are women, including Cheryl Benard and Hanna Rogan—both researchers of terrorist tactics. You will find Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance and Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, though.
• Speaking of those intrepid counters over at VIDA, the organization has just announced that next year’s count will include not only women in general and women of color in particular who were published in literary magazines, but also a separate count for LGBTQI folk and the differently abled. If you don’t know, VIDA is a group of volunteers who count all the women published in magazines like Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, plus all of the women whose books were reviewed by those outlets, and then they post the results using neat little charts. Editors pay close attention to these numbers and tend to correct for parity. David Remnick said in 2012, in regard to the number of women they publish at The New Yorker: “It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here. But we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that.”
• Speaking from personal experience, I was a poetry editor for a literary journal called Pleiades, and I found the pressure helpful. “The Count” was always in the room.
• You know where you’re not going to find a lot of racial parity? This year’s New York Times summer reading list, which features 100 percent white people! Will someone please telegraph the NYT and remind them the year? While you wait for their reply via carrier pigeon, check out The New Inquiry’s list of writers of color you should read this summer.
• If Ron Silliman has any writers of color on his bookshelves, then he’s certainly not acting like it. Last week, Silliman equated the people who signed the petition for Vanessa Place’s removal from a committee at the AWP conference to the cop who shot and killed Mike Brown. That’s a crazy thing to say.
• In other crazy news: New portrait of Shakespeare revealed, maybe! New face, same ‘stache. The author of the finding says he decoded the bard’s true identity from clues hidden in a portrait from an old botany book. Critics point out that real scholarship isn’t a game you could find in Highlights magazine.
• If you fancy yourself a bard of our fair city, then why don’t you don your laurel and apply for the City of Seattle’s 2015 Civic Poet position? Deadline is Thursday.
