Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? Facebook reveals that music and film make friendships; books, not so much.
Do Books Make Friendships?
In a Room of the Auction House
“It can not be that I monopolize / The making of the songs that give you praise / Or that such pools as are your dearest eyes / Have just one bather through the unclear days. / Then, let me take my place amid the pack, / If I so pack my songs with your rare worth / There were no quality they then should lack / But they were bettered by that happy death.” A previously unpublished Ezra Pound sonnet selling at auction is always newsworthy–especially when it fetches nearly $12,000. Here is a related Millions piece about the difficult poetry of Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and Ted Berrigan.
How Does It Feel / To Wait for a Release Date?
A release date for D’Angelo’s long-anticipated Voodoo follow-up is due any day now, so I really recommend checking out Amy Wallace’s stellar profile of the artist to stoke your interest.
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A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
Faulty Education
Recommended Reading: The Harvard Gazette on education and inequality. “If inequality starts anywhere, many scholars agree, it’s with faulty education.” Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes about closing the gap between high school and higher education.
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The Belgian Big Bad Wolf
Remember when Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by a hyena? Wait, that’s not the folktale we know. Whether or not Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten depends on where you hear the famous folktale, but anthropologist Jamie Tehrani discovered the origins of the scarlet-hooded girl — Belgium.
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47 New Ways to Bid Arms Goodbye
Apparently Faulkner isn’t the only modernist getting a little repackaging. A new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes each of the 47 endings Hemingway wrote for the novel will be published later this week.
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