It’s about an hour away from 5 o’clock over here, so that gives you plenty of time to read Chris Newgent’s “No-Bull Bourbon Review” on Hobart’s website. “A true bourbon,” Newgent writes, “is a bourbon with a story worth remembering.” Agreed. And so would Walker Percy.
No-Bull Bourbon Reviews
Half-off if you wear Victorian costume
There's a Chicago Poetry Brothel, FYI.
eReaders Versus the Printed Page
PCWorld releases a study on whether the iPad and Kindle make for slower readers than the printed page. (via AuthorScoop)
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Tuesday New Rease Day: Nesbø, Tillman
Jo Nesbø has a new noir from the North this week, The Leopard. Also out: Richard Nash's Red Lemonade continues to re-release the backlist of Millions favorite Lynne Tillman; this week it's Motion Sickness and No Lease on Life.
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Braving the Bestsellers
Canonical literature isn't the only way to learn about America. The bestseller list can be equally as telling. Matthew Kahn is reading 100 years of No. 1 bestsellers from 1913 to 2013. He blogs about the books and discusses the project in an interview with Salon's Laura Miller. When Miller asks what makes a bestseller, he claims, "A lot of it is just a matter of accessibility. A focus on plot and character rather than structure and the prose itself."
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“Gallop[ing] terribly”
We’re nearing the halfway point in football season (have you done your reading?), so that means it’s time to revisit one of the finest poems ever written about the game: James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.”
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Our young robot overlords
Looks like our robot overlord is going to be a 13-year-old boy: the Turing Test has been passed for the first time by a bot simulating a preteen, making history for artificial intelligence research and teenagers alike. "Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything," researchers explained.
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“QB or not QB”
Is Rick Reilly’s poem about Tim Tebow so terrible that it could’ve sent “a shockwave through time, producing reverberations before it ever happen[ed]?” Matt Ufford thinks so.
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Goodness, much thanks for the nod, Nick. And for linking that Percy bit. I’d never read it, and good goddamn if that’s not something to aspire to with these columns.
Hey, my pleasure.
That Percy piece is among my all-time faves. I’ll always love this phrase: “the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime.”