You may have heard that the actor Peter O’Toole passed away in London on Saturday. As a tribute, Longform republished a 1963 profile of O’Toole by Gay Talese, who accompanied the Lawrence of Arabia star on a trip to Ireland.
Ould Soul
Newly Found Old Book
A 4,000-year-old manuscript has been found in Egypt, predating the “Book of the Dead.” Covered with colorful drawings and illustrations, the manuscript depicts divine beings and spells from incantations.
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Last of the Mohicans, First of the Republicans
At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir dubs Lincoln "a tremendous accomplishment." (It probably doesn't hurt that its director is Steven Spielberg.)
Monsters and Wild Things
At the Oxford University Press blog, Professor Stephen T. Asma considers the place of Where The Wild Things Are in our culture's larger obsession with monsters (zombies, wolfmen, vampires, etc.).
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Working-Class Heroine
"That no-way-out is really the difference between boys and girls in working-class culture, because a working-class boy could run, or could when I was growing up." Guernica interviews Dorothy Allison about literature as glory; survival, opportunity, and gender; and working-class heroes vs. heroines. For your reading consideration: Bill Morris's essay on the riches of "white trash" literature.
40 Towns, An Experiment in Literary Journalism
Jeff Sharlet had a challenge for his creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth College. Sensing that journalism had become too “dull,” too mired in a “culture of professionalism” divided “between reporting and ‘storytelling,’” Sharlet asked his students who didn’t “know [any] better” to create a magazine of their own. The result, 40 Towns, embraces “the right conditions” of literary creation – immersion, journalism, regionalism and “a term of revision” – to present a “collection of documents, artifacts of real life” about the Upper Valley.
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Strange Bedfellows Department: Glenn Beck and The French Insurrectionists
You may have heard that Glenn Beck, sower of anxiety about Obamanomics, is also a shill for gold coin dealer Goldline. But here's a conspiracy theory for you: Does Glenn Beck also have a stake in the modish French theoretical organ Semiotext(e)? The truth is out there, people.
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“If there’s one thing I know about it’s beer”
The Wall Street Journal sent Geoff Dyer a bottle of El Segundo Brewing Company’s Blue House Citra Pale ale, and asked him to write about it. Because he’s Geoff Dyer, and there isn’t a topic (e.g. aircraft carriers, photography) on Earth that he can’t write about, he of course obliged.
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