The Julie Powell interview at Powell’s — on butchery and infidelity and self-disclosure.
Julie Powell at Powell’s
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
Year in Reading alum Maria Popova of Brain Pickings writes her first book review for The New York Times on Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall, a Harvard cosmologist. Randall proposes ”that a thin disk of dark matter in the plane of the Milky Way triggered a minor perturbation in deep space that caused the major earthly catastrophe that decimated the dinosaurs.” Jenny Hendrix writes about modern-day extinction for The Millions.
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Donohgue and Cunningham at Symphony Space
In New York? Visit Symphony Space tonight (12/6) at 7:30 PM to see Emma Donoghue in conversation with author Michael Cunningham. Donoghue’s Year in Reading entry appeared here today.
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A Daredevil By Any Other Name
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life might well be the only book in history to draw comparisons between creative writers and stunt pilots. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova calls attention to a description of Dave Rahm, the real-life pilot who inspired Dillard’s analogy.
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Benefits Does Have a Nicer Ring to It
In its treatment of the poor, Britain may be “going back to the Middle Ages,” says Booker repeat winner Hilary Mantel. Indeed, she explains, “In some respects … Cromwell lived in a more enlightened time.” And she’s not the only high profile UK author to come to the side of government welfare these days. In a two–part interview for The Daily Show, J.K. Rowling notes that she couldn’t have written her first books without government “benefits.”
The Irish Console The Irish
Over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Nick Curley prescribes “five passages from great Irish writers” as a means of coping with Notre Dame’s recent loss to Alabama in the college football BCS National Championship Game.
Joan Didion on Woody Allen
The New York Review of Books posts a vintage essay by Joan Didion on the films of Woody Allen: “This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s ‘relationships’—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents. In fact the paradigm for the action in these recent Woody Allen movies is high school.”
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