Recommended Viewing: This 1952 documentary about William Faulkner and his hometown.
Mississippi, 1952
Send In the Clowns
Coulrophobes take heed! You’re not scared of clowns because they’re inherently dark, or even because you caught a few minutes of Stephen King’s IT on television. In fact, you probably owe your fear of clowns to a fellow named Joseph Grimaldi, the “Homo erectus of clown evolution.” When this progenitor died in 1837, a young Charles Dickens “was charged with editing his memoirs.” The resulting portrait, relays Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, was what ultimately “water[ed] the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown.”
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Continuing Tin House’s great “The Art of The Sentence” series, Vishwas Gaitonde dives deep into the opening line from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. (Come on, we all know the one.) Be sure to catch Tin House‘s previous TAoTS series installments as well.
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Writing While Pretty
“I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror.” Author, Boots spokesperson, Year-in-Reading alum, and all-around badass Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to The New York Times about beauty, feminism, and writing.
Chasing Candy
Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson teamed up on a series of short films to advertise Prada’s newest perfume Candy L’Eau. Click for the Andersonian single-camera sweep shots; stay for the intriguing French love triangle.
La Buena Educacion
At The Paris Review Daily, Pedro Almodóvar tallies the elements of cinematic comedy, which include good timing, “rapid-fire dialogue” and rehearsals that draw out spontaneous performances from actors.
Fiction in Motion
If you see something, read something: Yesterday New York City’s MTA launched Subway Reads, an eight-week-long initiative allowing strap-hangers to download novellas, short stories, or excerpts from books via the city’s new(ish) wi-fi service in 175 underground stations. They’ve even timed the length of Which news in turn begs the question: what would Borges say?
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Tommy Pico on Being a Poem
"Shall I be a poem for you?" Tommy Pico asks in his latest book, Feed, an ode to reconciling life's wild inconsistencies.
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