Yesterday was Fat Tuesday down in New Orleans, and if you missed the action down there, you can certainly get a taste of the local flavor by reading Rick Bragg’s 1997 piece in The New York Times, “New Orleans Doesn’t Wait for Friday.” (via)
It Doesn’t End on Tuesday, Either
Balance of Power: Grossman and Beha, Reader and Writer
Lev Grossman‘s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” drew an interesting collection of comments, as well as a considered response from Christopher Beha at n+1.
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Welcome to Book Town
“Book lore and book history and everything around them, to do with libraries or culture, I think it centers so much of civilization.” Atlas Obscura interviewed journalist Alex Johnson about his forthcoming title, Book Towns, which explores off-the-beaten-path towns bursting with bookshops.
On Book Reviews
Kyle Minor (In the Devil’s Territory) has written a delightful list of “Five Hazards of the Book Review Biz” for HTMLGiant.
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.
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Elmore Leonard’s Detroit
Does a writer make the city or does the city make the writer? At Grantland, Michael Weinreb discusses why Elmore Leonard is the ultimate Motor City writer and discovers Leonard’s Detroit. “Without his books, the city would still have suffered the same hellish decline. But because of him, that suffering was rendered into an art form all its own.” Pair with: Our own Bill Morris writing against Detroit’s ruin porn reputation.
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“God put the needle on the disc of Saturn / The record he played revealed blueprints and patterns”
GZA has teamed up with top cosmologists and physicists from MIT and Cornell to produce his latest album, Dark Matter. The album is the first in a series “designed to get a wide audience hooked on science.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Russell, Koch, Crace, Mohr, Binchy, Conklin, Lasdun
New this week: Karen Russell’s new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove; buzzed-about thriller The Dinner by Herman Koch; Harvest by Jim Crace; Fight Song by Joshua Mohr; the final novel of the late Maeve Binchy, A Week in Winter; Tara Conklin’s debut The House Girl; and James Lasdun’s non-fiction Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.
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