When it comes to what people choose to read on the morning commute, we at the Book Bench try not to judge. We're lovers of all kinds of books—high-brow, low-brow, fiction, non-fiction, mystery, memoir, history, romance, kids' books, and so on—and we think you should cling to whatever makes the dreary train or bus ride more bearable. But I'm all giggles today after reading the news that the unabridged Kama Sutra has been made into an audiobook for the first time in its 1,600-year history. "Too shy to read the Kama Sutra on the train during rush hour? Just take out your headphones," Reuters helpfully suggests. While it's true that listening to a book is even sneakier than reading one on a Kindle, I'd be afraid that my face would give me away. If everyone can see the cover of your Kama Sutra, everyone knows what you're up to—for better or worse. If you're listening to the Kama Sutra, you've got a secret. Suppose you smirk or blush at the wrong moment? What will your fellow passengers think then? Ah, the seeds of paranoia are planted.

It also occurs to me that in many parts of the world, people do not take trains or buses to work. They drive. Listening to the Kama Sutra on a car stereo invites all kinds of potential peril. Imagine offering to drive a co-worker to lunch, only to find the audiobook springing back to life—just where you left off that morning—as soon as you put the key in the ignition. What about first dates? Or picking up your niece from elementary school? It all recalls that wonderfully awkward scene in the film "It's Complicated," where Steve Martin, embarrassed in front of Meryl Streep, fumbles as he tries to silence the divorce-themed self-help tape blaring in his car.

Still, we mustn't be squeamish. The Kama Sutra isn't just about sex positions, after all. It's an important historical document, a spiritual guide, a lovely work of poetry. It's more than an issue of Cosmopolitan. But Simon Petherick, the managing director of Beautiful Books, the publisher of the new audiobook, isn't making it easy to keep our minds on literary merit. "Some may also consider using the audio book as a step-by-step manual for improving bedroom techniques, without the need to stop and start with constant reference to a book," he said. Yikes! We're no longer talking about the morning commute, here.

Perhaps raised eyebrows—and even a a snort of laughter or two—are warranted, after all.

A deeply troubling article sat atop the New York Times’ most-emailed list yesterday (no, not the one about catching horrible diseases at the gym). “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age,” the headline proclaimed, pinpointing a problem, weaving a theory, and excusing youthful copycats in one fell swoop. The story here is that a large number of college students today are acting as college students always have—baldly lifting whole passages for their term papers from other sources. But it’s the Digital Age now, and between unverifiable, unattributed information sitting around online and the general ease with which young people obtain, alter, and share creative content on the Internet, students can’t seem to figure out that cheating on a paper is wrong. In fact, a lot of them can’t even tell that they’re cheating, and the Internet is to blame.

Really? When I was in college (I graduated three years ago), I was well aware of the necessity of avoiding minefields of unattributed—and often incorrect—information on the Web. Wikipedia was never an acceptable source, perhaps because my professors knew they’d get students like the one from the University of Maryland who, when “reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia… said he thought its entries—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.” There are probably only two types of people pulling these excuses: the crafty, using the Digital Age argument to their advantage, and the completely clueless, who, like plenty in preceding generations, just don’t understand the concept of plagiarism. The Times asked current students to weigh in (helpfully labelling them “Generation Plagiarism”), and one wrote:

Elizabeth Kolbert’s startling piece on the overfishing of the world’s oceans got us thinking about those creatures who live beneath the waves. This week’s contest features covers that depict scaly sea-dwellers, in their natural habitats or otherwise. Good luck!

Submit the first fully correct response via e-mail and win a copy of the brand-new anthology “The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.” In the event of confusion, consult our official rules. We’ll announce the winner tomorrow afternoon.

Once the announced ban on BlackBerry devices takes effect in October, folks in the United Arab Emirates and, it seems, in Saudi Arabia, will have to find new ways to exercise their thumbs and annoy their fellow elevator-riders. (Read Deirdre’s thoughtful commentary on the ban, and on privacy in the Web age more generally.) BlackBerry’s prominence in the news this week reminded me that unlike some of its modern brand cousins (Xerox, Google), it has yet to achieve transitive-verb status in the English language. No one is said to be “blackberrying” anything when they’re clacking away on those tiny keys.

Such a word would be absurd—no one “iPhones” anything, either—but it nonetheless has a significant literary pedigree, being the title of a poem by Sylvia Plath, published in the September 15th, 1962 issue of The New Yorker, and available in full-text from the Poetry Foundation. The poem’s first stanza contemplates the timeless act of berry picking; the only modern object is a bottle, emptied of milk:

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, /
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, /
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea /
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries /
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes /
Ebon in the hedges, fat /
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. /
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. /
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

“Blackberrying” is a poem of late summer, capturing a ripeness that edges deliriously close to rot. Its immediate concerns—the luminous colors in nature, the lazy buzzing of juice-besotted flies, and the far-off sounds of crashing waves—may be simpler than the mechanics or political consequences of international eavesdropping, but, to a city-bound reader dreaming of the bounties of rural life, they seem somehow weightier.

Note: For more on Plath from this era, check out the British Library’s recently released collection of recordings that Plath did for the BBC, including readings of several poems, and a joint interview she did with her husband, Ted Hughes.

(Photograph: jurvetson, Flickr CC.)

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When does a fad become a meme? When people begin describing the world in terms of it. And so it is with Silly Bandz, which, for the uninitiated, are rubber bands made into shapes. They come in themed packs, like Rock Band:

To my knowledge, Silly Bandz were until recently coveted only by their intended audience: children (Susan Orlean analyzed the phenomenon). But now, quite curiously, the Silly Bandz sickness seems to have spread to more aged, not to say more intelligent, beings. One day ago, I spied two fashionable girls in the Condé elevator, both in short poofy skirts and four-inch heels, with arms covered in Silly Bandz. Two hours ago, I spotted a single tree-shaped Silly Band on the arm of a male colleague, who explained that he’d gotten it as a party favor over the weekend (the party was for a grownup); and one hour ago, I came across a post on Book Ends Literary Agency’s Web site that opened with the question:

What do Silly Bandz have to do with books?

I thought, Nothing? The post answered:

Well, nothing really. Sort of.

Then it talked about how kids can’t get enough Silly Bandz, and then it made its case:

As an adult with a nostalgic affinity for children’s literature, I’ve enjoyed perusing the exhaustive list of wonderful kids’ books that Susan Orlean posted Friday after asking readers to share their favorites on Twitter using the hashtag #booksthatchangekidsworlds. I wish I’d had such helpful recommendations last month, when I found myself travelling to New Haven to attend a baby shower for a couple of bookish graduate students—old friends of mine—who are anxiously awaiting the birth of their first child. These are the same folks who, back when they decided to get married, sent out a “save the date” message stamped on what looked like the card and paper pocket from the back of a library book, so I have no doubt that any child of theirs is destined to become a reader. Before leaving the city, I happily raided the children’s section at the Strand for a few titles to contribute to the baby’s personal library. (Every book collector must start somewhere, right?)

As I studied the the colorful array, I realized that I hadn’t given board books—those miraculous cardboard constructions designed not to tear or disintegrate when chewed—much thought since the days when my own baby sister was teething. A lot has changed since then: classics like “Goodnight Moon” and The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which I read in hardcover, are now offered in not just paperback but cardboard as well. Even “The Velveteen Rabbit“—a story that I found unspeakably sad and disturbing as an eight-year-old—has been adapted for a still younger set. (To those who nominated this title for Susan’s list, I ask: In the abridged version, does the Boy still get scarlet fever?) In addition to the children’s classics re-issued in cardboard form, there were also titles addressing baby’s every developmental need: books to teach numbers, letters, colors, and shapes; collections of photographs of zoo and farm animals; stories to inspire high self-esteem.

It was baffling yesterday morning to wake up and hear that the United Arab Emirates is banning BlackBerry service—not, as people have banned or burned books, because the phones contain secretive or scandalous or illegal information, but because the devices are simply too difficult to monitor. It’s as if the Bush administration had come right out and confiscated our home phones because, really, wire-tapping was such a pain. The announcement is a hard-line statement of authority that also sounds oddly like an admission of incompetence.

One of the more troubling aspects of the story was that the U.A.E. made little attempt to conceal the reason for the ban—that the BlackBerry’s Research in Motion servers are outside the country and that e-mails sent on them are so heavily encrypted that they are virtually impossible for the government to read. What has brought us to this point, when a country can, in essence, unabashedly announce that it is monitoring the private correspondence of its citizens? John L. Locke’s new book “Eavesdropping: An Intimate History” gave me a few ideas, including that the spread of the Internet has made us more accustomed to the idea of listening in on others. What is Facebook, after all, but a sophisticated method of eavesdropping? Just think of the irony that each user puts up a wall—once something meant to hide one person from another—only to post intimate information about who they’re dating and what they’re thinking all over it. So too with Twitter, Tumblr, and blogs (originally public diaries, after all): they’re like keyhole paintings, allowing us the titillation of lurking and listening in, without revealing ourselves or confessing whose profile we’re staring at, whose feed we’re feeding off of. It is, perhaps, only in such a context—where the Web has made eavesdropping more commonplace, and has put it in the hands of the everyman as much as the authorities—that the U.A.E. can be so bald about their reasons.

But the Internet hasn’t just changed our ideas about eavesdropping, it has also changed the context in which we do it. Locke's book has an extended section about eavesdropping across species lines. He writes, for example, about how some plants send a chemical S.O.S. signal to other plants when attacked by an herbivore; but the herbivore’s predators can also pick up on the chemicals, intercepting the signal to get some food of their own. Similarly, birds “increase their chances of survival by monitoring the calls of other birds—signals not even intended for their ears.” Of course, who can prevent such interceptions in a jungle or a forest, with no walls or boundaries? A few animals try: Killer whales feeding on seals send out fewer pulses than those feeding on fish, because the seals can hear the calls. Some birds can sing a so-called “quiet song” akin to whispering. The world of the Web, alas, isn’t so different from the web of the jungle—online, we’re simply never alone, and the only way not to be overheard may be to fall silent.

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As a typophile and lover of spicy punctuation, I was naturally charmed by Deirdre’s post last week on the interrobang. It sent me on a Web search for rare and unusual punctuation marks. I discovered that the snark, which looks essentially like a tilde floating over a period, has its own fan site, which defines it as “a simple punctuation mark to place at the end of a sentence when that sentence means something other than it explicitly states. It signifies verbal irony in writing.” You can make/fake your own snark, the site instructs, by adding a tilde after a period (.~), or, if you’re a developer, there are instructions for creating a ligature for the mark.

After my discovery of the snark, I was giddy when I came across a competition on Emdashes that prompts readers to write a letter to a punctuation mark. So far, there are over a hundred entries. My favorite is:

Dear Quotation Mark,

Do you ever have any ideas of your own?

Disappointed,
Annie

The interrobang has received a couple of letters, but the snark still has an empty inbox. Is anyone up to the challenge? If you enter the contest, be sure to share your entries with us here in the comments below.

(Illustration by Pollux.)