If you went to Dublin at one point and paid a visit to The Book of Kells — and if you didn’t, what gives? — you’ll appreciate this take on the artifact in The Irish Times.
That Old Thing?
Hors de Texte
I would like to nominate Sam Anderson’s riff on Roland Barthes’s Mythologies for the best lede ever. I would also like to order a tee shirt for a faux boy band composed of Lacan, Derrida, Barthes and Foucault.
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The Hip House Guest
Recommended Reading: Tyler Stoddard Smith’s essay on when Allen Ginsberg stayed with his family. “The following night, after Ginsberg’s poetry reading (why would I want to go to that?) a group of students eager for him to impart morsels of omniscience were forced to wait outside my room while we played video games on my Atari 2600—I destroyed Ginsberg at Frogger, but he eviscerated me on Combat.”
Figuratively Unbelievable
Getting sick of people who overuse the word “literally”? A new browser extension kindly replaces instances of the word with “figuratively.” At Slate, Will Oremus tries out a godsend for pedants. (A Millions piece by Fiona Maazel nicely complements his article.)
King Braggadocio
“I was dropping out of college and had begun a novel and returned to New York. A bookstore in Manhattan announced a rare reading and signing by Anthony Burgess, a primary hero of mine at the time, for his autodidact’s erudition and braggadocio, and for how he’d gentrified a number of outre genres just by picking them up and mingling them with his erudition and braggadocio.” At the LARB, Jonathan Lethem remembers a formative reading by the author.
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The Struggles of Karl Ove Knausgaard
“But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing—maybe art in general—will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value,” Karl Ove Knausgaard said in an interview with Jesse Barron for The Paris Review. They discuss memory, personal crisis, artistic shame, and how he would burn My Struggle if there were less copies. Make sure to check out our review.