The great singer-songwriter Josh Ritter is on tour with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. In honor of that, here’s puppet master Liam Hurley‘s video for Josh Ritter’s beautiful ballad “The Curse,” a song about a mummy falling in love with the archeologist who discovers him.
A Mummy Love Story
Teju’s Twitter Takeover
Last week, we discussed how Teju Cole has mastered literary Twitter, and that was before we knew that he tweeted a 4,000-word essay on immigration. “A Piece of the Wall” is composed of 250 tweets written during a seven-hour period and starts with: “I hear the sound of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song.”
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Space Invaders in The Smithsonian
Martin Amis isn’t the only highbrow fan of video games. As of last Friday, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington has begun “The Art of Videogames,” which is “one of the first major shows to explore the artistic power of the medium.”
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Meet Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound
What do SoCal’s “vapid consumerism, gang violence, and social apathy” sound like? Jesus Makes The Shotgun Sound! Brace yourself and have a listen to their Raidohead-y latest single, “Do Not The Clothes Make The Man?!” or, if you’re looking to induce epileptic fits, try the video.
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Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Announced
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction have been announced! Winners for 2016 are Viet Thanh Nguyen for his novel, The Sympathizer and Sally Mann for Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. You could also read Nguyen’s Year in Reading.
Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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The Extreme Edge of Experience
Year in Reading alumna Sarah Manguso writes about motherhood, writing, and the disintegration of the self in a moving essay for Harper’s. As she puts it, “I want to read books that were written in desperation, by people who are disturbed and overtaxed, who balance on the extreme edge of experience. I want to read books by people who are acutely aware that death is coming and that abiding love is our last resort.” Pair with Jaime Green’s Millions review of Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.
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Pale King Confusion
After our discovery yesterday that The Pale King was already on sale, the New York Times finds lots of angry booksellers, but not much by way of explanation.
Tuesday New Release Day: Davis; Tillman; Matthiessen; Sharma; Neuman; Lazar; Keegan; Doyle; Graedon; Begley
Out this week: Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis; What Would Lynne Tillman Do by Lynne Tillman; In Paradise by the late Peter Matthiessen; Family Life by Akhil Sharma; Talking to Ourselves by Andrés Neuman; I Pity the Poor Immigrant by Zachary Lazar; The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan; The Plover by Adam Doyle; The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon; and a new biography of John Updike by Adam Begley.
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