Kurt Anderson on the difference between writing a novel in first and third person voice: “Most third-person narrators are less like omniscient gods than exceedingly snoopy, well-informed ghosts. “
Well-informed ghosts
sail I said sail I will Sail
In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, Julian Gough asserts that the Irish Naval Service’s decision to name two ships after famous writers is a problem because “the State hasn’t yet earned the right to be associated with Beckett and Joyce.”
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Letter to Harlem
Over at Catapult, Morgan Jerkins writes on calling Harlem home. As she puts it, “Blackness is not one specific characteristic. It is many things, things that I have yet to discover. It means that different variations of blackness can find home in one another.”
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Like the Rugby Sestina
Villanelles and football predictions go together surprisingly well.
Debatable, To Say the Least
Researchers at Google have analyzed "audiovisual patterns," "title, description and tags," "words associated with amusement" in user comments, "emoticons," and even the number of o's in the average "LOL" in various YouTube videos in order to identify the funniest content on the web. Then they set up an algorithm to rank their findings, and subjected those findings to an audience vote (which you can join over here). Based on their calculations so far, this was the funniest video of all time. What do you think?
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Reading at Wimbledon
Though it's long been known as the gentleman's sport, tennis seems to be slipping a little bit in its cultural refinement. Melville House has a blog post on the reading habits of elite players, and they're spotty at best, though Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Camus are all mentioned, as are J.K. Rowling, Tolkien and, simply, "newspapers."
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