Pork Problem

The Critterati pets-in-literary-garb contest ends at midnight tonight!  You can view a gallery of the submissions as they appear, and some of them are phenomenal.  I especially like Humbert Humbert.  I don’t know how these people got their animals to cooperate (drugs, probably).  Big Ed and Nadine, aged six months, made it quite clear that under no circumstances would they be dressed up as Lata and Kabir from A Suitable Boy (what am I supposed to do with this tiny cardboard cricket bat now?)  Henry and June was also a non-starter, but that might have been unkind to do to siblings, anyway.  No one wants to see his sister chew up a garter belt. Evidently I’m not the only one to encounter massive opposition.

The thing about Dave Chappelle, writes Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in her marvelous essay on the comedian’s family history, the success of Chappelle’s Show, and how the two informed his opinions on race, “is that he was suddenly vaulted into the awkward position of being the world’s most famous interlocutor in a conversation about race—the one conversation no one likes having.” In light of his recent heckling in Connecticut, as well as the continued misinterpretation of his comedy, “it’s easy to understand why Chappelle was done with being misread, tired of explaining, [and so he] finished talking.”

In an interview with Spiegel, Günter Grass talks about writing after the Nobel Prize, his involvement with Hitler Youth, the e-book movement, and his “declaration of love” to the Brothers Grimm. (via Bookslut)