Our own Bill Morris has a piece in Artes Magazine about a landscape painter, Rackstraw Downes, who is finally “having a long-overdue moment.”
Appearing Elsewhere
Norway to Digitize Its Entire Library
In 2006, the National Library of Norway enacted an ambitious plan to digitize every book in its holdings by 2020. The idea is that all of the content (even works under copyright) will be accessible to people logging into the system with a Norwegian IP address.
Katrina’s Anniversary
While East Coasters are still dealing with the wrath of Hurricane Irene, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina passed yesterday. NPR has a timely interview with host Michel Martin, musician Irvin Mayfield and Keith Spera, author of Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal and the Music of New Orleans. Likewise, Rivka Galchen‘s 2009 Harper’s essay “Disaster Aversion” bears re-reading.
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Creating Thought Experiments
Recommended (Hip) Reading: On the the pretensions of pop by Dan Fox at Guernica Magazine.
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Big Books, Big Brains
We like big books and we cannot lie. But are books just continuing to get longer and longer? A new survey of bestsellers has concluded that the average book is now 25% bigger than its counterpart fifteen years ago. The Guardian investigates. Mark O’Connell at The Millions has his own theory about long books.
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Beware of the Gravedigger
Recommended Reading: On the literary tradition of objectifying and consuming women’s corpses.
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You Would Prefer Not To… Miss This.
Thursday 11/10, come on down to 60 Wall Street for a marathon reading of Herman Melville‘s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story was in part tied to the Occupy Wall Street movement by Hannah Gerson in a great piece for us last month.
Poetic Prayer
“I’m interested in character. I’m especially interested in how language—story, memory, names, word choice—reflects and reveals character. The language of the Catholic Church—the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels—was in many ways my first poetry. ” Year in Reading alumna Alice McDermott discusses her short story, “These Short, Dark Days,” published in the latest The New Yorker.