A harrowing interview with How to Sell author Clancy Martin is up at the Torpedo blog.
In the Confessional
Talk About That
“Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.” On Freud.
Natasha Trethewey Wraps Up Her Term as Poet Laureate
Robert Penn Warren was the subject of the lecture given by Natasha Trethewey last week. It was her final presentation as U.S. poet laureate, as her second term wraps up later this year.
The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte’s Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.
The End of Wall Street
In New York, Gabriel Sherman checks in on Wall Street and finds that the big money culture may be gone for good. “There has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation.”
Ghostwriter
The Swiss foundation Anne Frank Fonds is attempting to extend the copyright of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl by crediting Anne’s father as a co-author — even though Otto Frank writes in the prologue to the first edition that the book mostly contains Anne’s words.
Borrowing: It Runs in the Family
Hey, old timers, quit blaming my generation for “irresponsible” borrowing. It turns out folks older than forty own the same amount of student loan debt as folks younger than 30, and you guys have had at least a ten year head start in the workforce.