Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, authors of Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316040495/0316040495).

That’s right.  I was standing in the same entryway.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in announcing that it will not make the Kindle available to students until the device has improvements to be better enable blind people to use it.

I’m tickled to note that on November 2 Stephen Calt published … a nearly 300-page book titled Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary. . . . I actually think it’d make a great nightstand book, or, for those of you who keep stupid joke books by the toilet, this one might upgrade your ambiance some.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series “Star Trek”: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: “to go,” “to eat,” “to walk,” etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English — the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example — is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

According to one participant, the aim of the meetings, which culminated in a dinner Thursday evening, was for Amazon to “explain itself” to the agent community, whose members fear that e-books could undermine the book-publishing business much the way that digital file-sharing and iTunes upended the music industry.

(Editor’s note: I don’t believe that iTunes is responsible for the decline of the music industry. The $50+ iTunes charge on my credit card bill this past month proves that my kids are purchasing music at a faster rate than I did at a similar age. Now, it’s fine with me if you want to blame music business woes on file-sharing…)

Chris Fujiwara’s study of Jerry Lewis’s films, just published by the University of Illinois press, is valuable for several reasons. One, of course, is the author’s thorough and perceptive analysis of the films, which, by itself, would make the book essential reading.

Have you contemplated asking your father to organize your book tour?

Thank you for your consideration.

Best,
Michael