Rodney King, possibly the nation’s best-known victim of police brutality, will fight former Pennsylvania police officer Simon Aouad in a celebrity boxing match in Philadelphia on September 12. “I know some people will see the irony here,” King said. I’m not sure irony’s the word, but it’s something alright.
The Beating of Rodney King, Take Two
Matthiessen’s Beginnings
In memory of Peter Matthiessen, The Missouri Review has unlocked an interview with him from 1989. Matthiessen detailed the beginning of his writing career. "I started my first novel and sent off about four chapters and waited by the post office for praise to roll in, calls from Hollywood, everything. Finally my agent sent me a letter that said 'Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this a hundred and fifty years ago, only he wrote it better. Yours, Bernice.' I probably needed that; it was very healthy." For more Matthiessen, you can read one of his best travel essays or his new novel, In Paradise.
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The Death of the Camera
"Camera-equipped smartphones are now in spitting distance of outnumbering traditional cameras in the percentage of photos and videos taken with them," according to analyst NPD Group.
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Off to the Races
Following our coverage of the Man Booker Prize shortlist, it’s now time to place your bets on which book will eventually triumph. At The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker offers a tip based on previous winners: focus not on the book itself, but on its reviews.
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Pitchfork and The Dissolve
Pitchfork Media announced last week that it will begin supplemented its popular music website with a new project dedicated to “reviews, commentary, interviews, and news about the films of the moment.”
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Zen and the Art of Headlines
This handy guide from The Week shows how to identify which website a headline comes from, from Gawker to The New York Times. Pair with Janet Potter's Millions piece on rewriting book titles to get more clicks.
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Ellis Interviewed
Ahead of the release of Imperial Bedrooms, Vice has an interview with Bret Easton Ellis. "All my friends moved to Brooklyn. The only people I know in Manhattan are rich, and it just seems like, you know, the party was fun, but it’s kind of over for me. LA seemed to be the place to land."
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Fantastisch
In 1980, Julio Cortázar gave a series of lectures at Berkeley, which you can now read in the slim, simply-titled volume Literature Class. Among the highlights? This sentence: "I had lived with a complete feeling of familiarity with the fantastic because it seemed as acceptable to me, as possible and as real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening."
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From word nerd to language animal
David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: "It's a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird." The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.