Bill Clinton, at 65, has become the Blurber-in-Chief, an activist health convert who has enthusiastically endorsed three diet books: Eddie Shapes Up by Ed Koch, Think and Grow Thin by weight-loss coach Charles D’Angelo, and The Blood Sugar Solution: The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now, a new book by Dr. Mark Hyman. No more “Fat Elvis” jokes for Bill.
Clinton’s Appetite for Diet Books
Bring your @ game.
Sarah Weinman has compiled a list of verified literary Twitter accounts on her blog.
Not what he, nor I, expected.
Teju Cole on partying, though very civilly, with V.S. Naipaul: “The combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.”
Writing From the Other Wordsworth
The Oxford University Press blog has a never-before-published poem by Dorothy Wordsworth. She constructed the piece in 1839 while suffering from arteriosclerosis and dementia because “there was a therapeutic dimension both in creating and ‘performing’ poetry,” writes Lucy Newlyn.
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An Orphaned Bear
“He sat on a shelf of our one-roomed apartment for a while, and then one day when I was sitting in front of my typewriter staring at a blank sheet of paper wondering what to write, I idly tapped out the words ‘Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform. In fact, that was how he came to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the station.’ It was a simple act, and in terms of deathless prose, not exactly earth shattering, but it was to change my life considerably. … Without intending it, I had become a children’s author.” Michael Bond, creator of the Paddington Bear series, has died at 91, reports NPR. We’d like to think that Bond might have appreciated our own Jacob Lambert‘s series, “Are Picture Books Leading Children Astray?” – in particular this entry questioning the moral fiber of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
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The Literary Rx
A book a day keeps the doctor away. The Reach Out and Read Program hopes to give children (from 6 months to 5) as much exposure to books as vitamins when they got to the doctor’s office. Pediatricians who participate in the initiative discuss reading at every check-up by giving books to families, advising parents about the importance of reading to their kids, and monitoring how the children engage with books.
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Sally Wen Mao Reimagines Lost Moments
Poet and Oculus author, Sally Wen Mao, discusses art's role in redeeming history and reimagining lost moments and secrets.
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Remembering Denis Johnson
“He believed it a privilege and a shame that his race and nationality gave him the chance to come and go from lands where a guillotine blade seemed to dangle forever over the local citizens.” Denis Johnson‘s longtime Esquire editor Will Blythe pens a remembrance of the writer for The New York Times. See also: our own Sonya Chung‘s recommendation of Johnson’s celebrated short story collection Jesus’ Son to a friend some years back. “I know it will knock him out,” she wrote. “It does (of course).”
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