From the WSJ, NBA players who read books, some of them pretty good (books and players, I guess). Also, the old “Phil Jackson gives his players books” anecdote is a familiar one, but who knew he passed out copies of 2666? (Thanks, Craig)
Reading Courtside
“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory and considers “the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order.” Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg‘s piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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Burroughs’s curse, Capote’s burden
“Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else.” And other things William Burroughs’s wrote to Truman Capote. There’s a bit more backstory over at RealityStudio, though the letter stands on its fearsome and indignant own.
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“Everything’s been said, but it needs saying again.”
The Oxford American compendium of best ever southern words.
The Desert Oracle Gives You the Desert
Pacific Standards profiles Ken Layne who quietly started the popular quarterly literary magazine, Desert Oracle for a town of 8,000 people. Now it has gained far more readers than that as it highlights works related to the American desert. “The reason that the Oracle works is that it’s always trying to elicit that feeling, the awe and wonder that the desert reveals to you when you listen hard enough. Layne believes it’s not an accident that religious awakenings, UFO sightings, walkabouts, and other revelations occur in the desert. It’s a consequence of solitude, stark beauty, and the tenacious life that only the desert has.”
The Tournament of Books is Underway!
Yesterday, Searching for John Hughes author Jason Diamond kicked off this year’s Tournament of Books by judging the “play-in round.” Today, our own Kirstin Butler is deliberating between The Underground Railroad and Black Wave.
Has Odds, Will Bet
As previously reported, Haruki Murakami is favored to win the Nobel Prize in Literature seven-to-one. For more on the dubious practice of betting on literary awards, see this interview from last year with an employee of the London-based company responsible for calculating the odds.
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Debatable, To Say the Least
Researchers at Google have analyzed “audiovisual patterns,” “title, description and tags,” “words associated with amusement” in user comments, “emoticons,” and even the number of o’s in the average “LOL” in various YouTube videos in order to identify the funniest content on the web. Then they set up an algorithm to rank their findings, and subjected those findings to an audience vote (which you can join over here). Based on their calculations so far, this was the funniest video of all time. What do you think?
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The Tournament of Books
The field has been set for The Morning News‘ annual Tournament of Books. Who will emerge victorious this year? Will it be a DeWitt or a deWitt?