Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86. The prominent author, screenwriter, Norman Mailer-nemesis and political activist published 25 novels, two memoirs and many, many essay volumes in addition to plays, screenplays, and television scripts. For a time, he even loaned his own visage to the silver screen, as Mindy Hung recently pointed out on our site.
Gore Vidal Died
All in Our Heads
Ever since the advent of modern neuroscience, the language of the brain scientist has entered our common vocabulary. Words and phrases like "synapse," "chemical imbalance" and "hardwired" point to its relevance in contemporary culture. At Page-Turner, a look at how cognitive language and our notion of attention affects the way we think about fiction and music, with particular reference to On Beauty by Zadie Smith and Orfeo by Richard Powers.
Now Turn to Page Thirty
Rebecca Schuman argues in an essay for Slate that extraordinarily long course syllabi are killing the college classroom. If it’s academic homicide you’re after, you might also want to check out Cathy Day’s piece for The Millions in which she suggests that academia might just be killing the novel, too.
●
●
Correcting Gender Inequity
The Interference Archive went on a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to help balance gender inequality on the site, which is overwhelmingly edited by men. Our own Sonya Chung writes on how to write across gender.
●
●
Times: New Film and Book Claim Five New J.D. Salinger Books to Be Published Starting in 2015
The Times is reporting that a new film and companion book (Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno) "include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015." One of the books is said to include a retooled version of Salinger's unpublished (but available at the Princeton library) story "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans." Kristopher Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) wrote about the story for us in 2011. Bonus Link: Garth Risk Hallberg on Salinger's legacy.
New Sherlock Holmes Story
The last few weeks have been all about rediscovered works by beloved authors, first Harper Lee's upcoming sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, then Dr. Seuss's What Pet Should I Get? Now Arthur Conan Doyle joins the trend with a rediscovered Sherlock Holmes short story, available online from Vulture.
●
●