In a turn of events that are probably not good for Baltimore’s reputation for decay, the Edgar Allen Poe House might close due to lack of funds. The Times had the details when news of the troubles first broke; at The Paris Review, you can find more links and laments.
Every House ‘Round Here a Poe House
Race In The Hunger Games
Anna Holmes takes a good look at Hunger Games Tweets, the Tumblr dedicated to rounding up the astonishing number of racist and culturally careless fans of Suzanne Collins’ books. Later on, she mentions a University of Wisconsin study which found that “only 9% of the 3,400 children’s books published [in 2010] contained significant cultural or ethnic diversity.”
Finding “the fountainhead of the humanities”
Tracing the biological origins of aesthetics, Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson argues for a tighter bond between the humanities and the sciences and identifies the metaphor as the wedge that will keep them forever divided.
“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory and considers “the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order.” Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg‘s piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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Curiosities: 8x Buffalo
Appearing Elsewhere: VQR Young Reviewers Contest winner and Millions contributor Emily drops by the NBCC blog to tell them what she’s been reading.The NY Times fleshes out some of the details of Google’s digitizing agreement with publishers and authors, including getting into some of the numbers involved. We explained the importance of the deal last year.At Jacket Copy Carolyn Kellogg gets Sarah Weinman to discuss the secrets behind her incredible speed-reading ability. (462 books in 2008!)Carolyn also recently highlighted all the great literary magazines that supplied the featured stories in last year’s “best of” fiction anthologies, as well as the runners up.80 years after the last one, a new Winnie the Pooh book is on its way.A timely and topical list: the Top 10 green books of 2008For the multi-tasker (or perhaps the really lazy): the book holder bracelet.”Had I an atheist friend who asked, ‘Can you tell me please what this religion business is all about, not as some metaphysical hypothesis or historical phenomenon, but what it really means to be religious?’ I might hand him or her a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. ‘Read this,’ I’d say, ‘and it will give you a pretty good idea.'”For sports fans: Bill James on why statisticians should boycott the BCS.That perilous question: why blog?Vice did a fiction issue.David Brooks discusses some of the best long-form journalism of 2008 (with links!)The outgoing president’s surprising reading list.The Hype Machine’s impressive top albums of 2008 project.Wikipedia find of the week: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffaloA consideration of poet Jack Spicer.With apologies to William Carlos Williams, A poem for Blago.New short fiction from Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness (via Scott)Jonathan Franzen on the Social Novel (via OUP blog)
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Lolita, in the Margins
When Vladimir Nabokov developed a screen adaptation for Lolita, his director Stanley Kubrick declared it the “best ever written in Hollywood”–meaning, it seems, most gorgeously novelistic, evocative, readable. Here’s a short excerpt of his screenplay with original margin notes.
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