Recommended Reading: “Patterns” by Kristiina Ehin, which has a better opening line than anything else you’re going to read this month, I promise.
Glad to hear they’re doing well.
Real Life Rosebud
Last month, we got the gossip from Orson Welles. This month, the dirt is about him. His first film, Too Much Johnson, was recently rediscovered in Italy.
From word nerd to language animal
David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: “It’s a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird.” The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.
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Translating on a Tether
“There are so many ways to look at translation. One that has recently occurred to me is that of a tether: the translator is tethered to the meaning of the original the way an animal can be tethered to a stake. You can’t take off and roam the hills, but you can definitely move around and experience a comfortable degree of freedom.” Asymptote talks with Juliet Winters Carpenter about Japanese tanka poetry, Machi Tawara‘s Salad Anniversary, and the careful balance of translation.
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Living in Letters
Recommended Reading: On the collected letters and lovers of Iris Murdoch.
Patron Saint of Decency & Feminism
Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother, taught America a thing or two about decency and feminism: her scathing pen wrote books about the excesses of American society and its alienation of women. Over at Bloom, Cynthia Miller Coffel writes about this trailblazing woman who should be considered “the patron saint of middle aged women writers.”
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Critical Texts
Louis Menand writes about why the women’s movement needed The Feminine Mystique (despite its shortcomings). You could also read a review of Rebecca Jo Plant’s Mom, which looks to The Feminine Mystique to understand why our culture blames mothers.
Populist Is Popular
“The demagogic spirit of the ‘radio priest’ Father Charles Coughlin and the ‘minister of hate’ Gerald L.K. Smith has been reborn in the candidacy of Donald Trump, just as the exhortations of the Louisiana boss and rabble-rouser Huey Long, who declared war on ‘the superrich’ and proposed a ‘Share Our Wealth Society,’ all but predicted Bernie Sanders’s attack on ‘the billionaire class.'” Examining what political books can tell us about the election season with Sam Tanenhaus at The New York Times.
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