Nicholson Baker has written the funniest piece yet about the Kindle. Ed initially takes umbrage (and gets comments from Baker and recants somewhat). YPTR weighs in as well.
Kindle Jollies
Shellacked Decorative Vegetables
Halloween might be over, but the season of freakishly large decorative gourds lives on. Here’s a fascinating essay from The Toast on how to raise enormous pumpkins–county fair, here we come.
Love Letters to Walt Whitman
Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings recounts the enduring epistolary friendship—one that often bordered on infatuation—between Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman.
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British Museum Sound Archive
The Guardian reports that the British Library has made its archive of world and traditional music available online. And it’s free for everyone. What might you hear? “There are Geordies banging spoons, Tawang lamas blowing conch shell trumpets and Tongan tribesman playing nose flutes. And then there is the Assamese woodworm feasting on a window frame in the dead of night.” You might also check out the British Museum’s free online image database. Here you’ll find thousands of images of paintings, etchings, drawings, and artifacts from every country and era of human history, easily searchable by era, country, artist, or subject. In using the database for dissertation research, I also found copyright permissions relatively easy to acquire.
Isabelle Eberhardt, Dependent on Chance
The Paris Review's excellent column, "Feminize Your Canon," returns with Isabelle Eberhardt, a cross-dressing Swiss explorer and author who published under a male pseudonym as a teenager.
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Hilary Mantel’s Hospital Diary
“In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled… When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?” Hilary Mantel writes a diary on hospitalization for the London Review of Books.
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Gone in the Dark
“And so the book we have available to us is not the one she intended for us to see — and to those who knew her only as the private spouse of a public figure, Michelle McNamara emerges from these pages as much of a mystery as the Golden State Killer does, gone in the dark.” In Vulture, a profile of the late true crime writer Michelle McNamara whose book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, was published last week. From our archives: an essay on why one writer reads true crime novels.