“It just goes to show you: it’s not just luck you need to have a successful literary career. It’s luck, piled on luck, piled on luck again, and around the corner, you need another sprinkling of it” says Michelle Dean, after investigating Stephen King’s rise in response partly to Dwight Allen’s “Snob Notes” on the author. Colin Dickey and Sarah Langan have both previously weighed on on Allen’s essay and King’s particular strengths.
King’s Critics
The Truth Hurts
Good news! According to Vinson Cunningham’s new essay in The New Yorker, beauty merely “masks and perfumes … it freezes moral categories in place,” whereas ugliness, on the other hand, “is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” Wait, is that good news? Bonus: Vinson wrote a Year in Reading piece for us.
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Measuring Hell
“Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one.” Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics may have come from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno.
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Ah, the Humanities!
Nicholas Dames is a wonderful writer, and I suggest you read his essay on the “crisis” in the Humanities.
Some links
“i need more sprawling post-modern novels NOW!” is the plea at Ask MetaFilter.Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has thousands of images from their collection online. It’s just like being in the dusty stacks.I’ve been enjoying emdashes lately. It’s a blog about my favorite magazine.
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Steinbeck’s Journalism
For This Land Press, which you really should be checking out regularly, Millions contributor Brian Ted Jones looks into John Steinbeck’s work as a journalist, and also the “New Joads” of Oklahoma.
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Rooster Starter Kit
The Morning News Tournament of Books is around the corner (less than two weeks away, in fact) and readers can now download the bracket (pdf), print it out, and start scribbling in their picks. Along with the bracket, Andrew Seal offers up an array of intriguing statistics from past tournaments. So, now that you can make an educated guess, Who do you think is going to win this year?
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Education in America
In The New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton has a long piece on the issues facing the American university system. I’ve previously linked to Malcolm Harris‘ excellent n+1 piece on the “higher education bubble,” but this infographic vividly illustrates that same inflation.
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Addendum: Though I hadn’t seen it by the time I wrote this post, Alan Jacobs also has a pointed defense of Stephen King (in response to Allen’s snobbery) over at The Atlantic.