Say goodbye to Binky and Sheba, everybody. After 32 years, Matt Groening pulled the plug on his Life In Hell comic last week with this installment. If you’re unfamiliar with the strip, you can play a round of catch-up by scouring this German website’s 70-strip archive.
Rest in Hell
To the Literary Racetracks!
It’s that time of year again, readers. It’s time to stock up on gossip, skim through pieces on your favorite writers and populate your bookmarks with pages from Ladbrokes and Intrade. It’s time, in other words, to prognosticate the Nobel Prize winner, which Ladbrokes predicts will be the novelist Haruki Murakami. If you read Ben Dooley’s review of 1Q84, you might have placed your bets already.
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“He hasn’t come down since”
According to a new biography of Richard Pryor, the legendary comedian kicked off his career as a teen in Peoria, Illinois, when he starred in a play based on Rumpelstiltskin and “broke the other kids up.” At The Nervous Breakdown, nine choice passages from the book.
Footnotes as Fine Art
Recommended reading: Jonathan Russell Clark examines “The Fine Art of the Footnote” for Literary Hub. Pair with his Millions articles on the opening sentence, the closing sentence, and doing away with quotation marks altogether.
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New Harvey
At Variety‘s blog, news that Steven Speilberg has signed on to his next project: A remake of Harvey, the Pulitzer-winning 1944 play and beloved 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie about a man, Elwood P. Dowd, and his friendship with an invisible giant rabbit.
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Speaking of The New Yorker…
Is just me, or has The New Yorker been resurgent the last few weeks? In addition to the David Grann piece mentioned below, we’ve gotten: Bloomberg, diving, James Wood‘s most cogent essay to date on atheism and belief, and a F-B-P triple play. (That’s Friend to Bilger to Paumgarten, for those keeping score at home.) And I read the fiction for five issues in a row – a personal best. I know they assemble these things far in advance, but it still feels like the Ian Frazier “Siberia” two-parter, eight years in the making, started some kind of conflagration of awesomeness. Thoughts?
Anthony Shadid Dies in Syria
It was shocking to find that New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid had died, of an asthma attack of all things, while reporting in Syria, especially when he’s put himself in harm’s way so many other times and emerged unscathed. Tyler Hicks, the Times photographer who was with Shadid when he died and who escorted his body out of Syria was, along with Shadid, among of the four journalists captured and held in Libya less than a year ago in the early days of the uprising there. Shadid’s reporting was brave and essential there and elsewhere. His death comes just weeks before the release of a memoir, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East.
“The Book the Internet Was Invented For”
On the infinite recreation and reimagining of Finnegans Wake, a book that was “crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires,” from The Guardian.
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