This week, the Ransom Center at UT-Austin opened up its archives of the works of J.M. Coetzee. Because the Nobel Prize winner is an alumnus, he says it’s “a privilege to have graduated from being a teaching assistant at The University of Texas to being one of the authors whose papers are conserved here.” (Fun fact: his starting salary was $2,300 a year.)
Class Notes
I Go Salsa Dancing
Following the release of Before Midnight, the new installment in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy of films, Michelle Orange takes another look at Linklater’s 2001 movie Waking Life. (In case you don’t remember the film’s trippy style, here’s a clip.)
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take three
Now, Vintage asks: what will be the classics of the future? (via Maud)So, I don’t get it. Did Bob Woodward have this book waiting in a desk drawer until Deep Throat’s identity was revealed? Woodward is a good journalist, but he may be a better businessman. USA Today scored a copy a week early and reveals some Watergate-era tidbits here.I got a free trial download from Audible.com, the digital audiobook store. I selected Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. The downloading process was very quick and easy. I’ll let you know how the listening experience is once I find time to check it out.
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Mutually Exclusive
Diehard fans of Herzog, Dangling Man and other great books by Saul Bellow will be interested to learn that the author, as revealed in a new memoir by his son, once asked himself the following question: “Was I a man or a jerk?”
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Have you heard the one about the Holocaust historian who loves Donald Trump? No, really. Eric Metaxas, most well-known for his biography of the theologian/anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has claimed that Trump’s rhetoric is all just “schtick,” and that the man himself is “culturally Jewish.”
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An Illusion To Think So
“We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies.” This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.
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Breaking the Binary
Rachel Klein writes on raising a genderqueer, non-binary child. “Being a parent means, at some point, being able to look on as your child writes their own story, a story in which you play a role but which is ultimately not about you.”
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