Everything we think about Henry David Thoreau is wrong.
“Not Exactly a Hermit”
Emily Wells
If you like the music of groups like Portishead, CocoRosie, and the Cocteau Twins, you might be interested in the eerie musical dreamscapes of Emily Wells, a gifted violinist and vocalist whose work combines classical, folk, and hip hop. Here she performs “Symphony 1 In the Barrel of a Gun.”
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All the things that are in me are in you
Lev Grossman discusses inheritable libraries, the similarities between print books and wifi, and the pleasures of the codex in this video.
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True Story
Over at Granta, Melissa Febos writes about truth. As she puts it, “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries.”
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Under the Bonzai
Here’s a thing you’ve probably never thought of before: the sheer weirdness of some of the Christmas rituals in many canonical children’s books. In The Irish Times, Rosita Boland catalogues a few of the stranger ones, including Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Christmas dinner in summer and Lucy’s gift of a dagger in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
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Not Just the Mind’s Eye
A new Tumblr, The Composites, takes descriptions of characters from novels and feeds them through police composite sketch software to produce images of their “faces.” Creepy and cool. (via kottke)
The New Western
“The presentation of himself as a damaged outsider, barely holding on, ups the dramatic ante, though it does seem at odds with the accomplished, balanced, commanding prose he appears able to muster with every sentence — not to mention his prestigious awards and teaching stints.” On Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.
“Blake was all bullshit except for the bomb.”
Millions contributor Nick Ripatrazone – who’s recently written for us about college football and the art of the novella – has new fiction up at storySouth.
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