A couple of Pale King odds & ends: N+1 reruns Benjamin Kunkel‘s astute DFW memoriam, and Jonathan Raban tackles the religious side of the Wallace weltanschauung for the NYRB. (Whither Wyatt Mason?)
More Pale King
Read to Me Tuesday
Among the better Tumblr memes is Read to Me Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like: people choose a passage from a book, call in and read the passage over the phone. The resulting posts are compiled under the hashtag #RTMT and often re-blogged by rtmt.tumblr.com. As we see increased interest in social reading experiments like bookglutton.com, RTMT shows how the web might make social connection through reading aloud a possibility for the first time since, well, story time. Plus it’s really, really fun.
Editorial Notes
“Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy [Gordon] Lish calls ‘consecution,’ the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense.” At Full-Stop, Daniel Green examines the editor’s influence in a piece on Noy Holland’s new book.
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Captain Pentagon
“In the 1970s it circulated among Left Bank intellectuals, including Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as an aid to productive writing. In 1981 it was listed as a controlled substance in the US and in 1986, after it was scheduled under the WHO Convention on Psychotropic Substances, it was removed from prescription sale.” The London Review of Books reviews two histories about the role of drugs in the fighting of wars, Blitzed: Drugs In the Third Reich by Norman Ohler and Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare by Łukasz Kamieński Hurst. Both pay particular attention to Captagon (the name a portmanteau of “captain” and “pentagon”), a pharmaceutical that has become common throughout Eastern Europe, the Gulf States, India, and China, and by 2014 “had become a significant source of funding for all sides in Syria’s civil war.”
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Addenda
Recommended Reading: Amit Majmudar on Virgil’s The Aeneid.
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Rock the Vote
Well, that’s one way to get the youth involved in politics. According to this piece over at The Daily Beast, “Before Tinder, before shopping malls, drive-ins, or speak-easies, young people searched for a place to meet and flirt. In 19th century America, wild political rallies offered the perfect opportunity.”