“He was a sassy youngster…[A]s to burning the epistle up or not—it never occurred to me to do anything at all: what the hell did I care whether he was pertinent or impertinent? he was fresh, breezy, Irish: that was the price paid for admission—and enough: he was welcome!” Turns out Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker were pen pals.
“He was a sassy youngster”
Which One Will Write An Essay About It First?
Did you miss 192 Books’ Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan conversation a few weeks back? Well, good thing for you that FSG put the whole transcript online.
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Amazon: criticism you can count on
A study of the top 100 non-fiction titles between 2004 and 2007, and the major media and Amazon reviews for each title, yields some fascinating results: “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”
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This Ain’t New
Slang, as readers of Shakespeare know, affects the development of language as much as any genus of terminology. At Salon, Jonathon Green writes about the strange history of English slang, as part of an excerpt from his new book, The Vulgar Tongue. You could also read our own Michael Bourne on the use of “like” in modern English.
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Well, That Explains A Lot of Twitter.
People like to think that the more books they read, the better people they’ll become. But is that really true? The answer’s unclear. But one thing does seem apparent: reading more books might make you better at bullying people.
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“manuals for a thinking person”
Jed Perl on Susan Sontag’s journals: “The fascination of Sontag’s prose—and its sadness—is in the extent to which she is describing herself as a person who can never really get beyond a schematic kind of thinking and feeling.”