J.D. Salinger‘s house is on the market and generating plenty of buzz, but before you make an offer consider “what does it mean to want to live in a dead writer’s house? When does fandom devolve into idolatry?”
The Dead Author’s Home
Simic on Strand
“By now, you are probably asking yourself, Did these two ever talk about anything serious? Of course, we did. We talked about how writing a poem is no different from taking out a frying pan and concocting a dish out of the ingredients available in the house, how in poetry, as in cooking, it’s all a matter of subtle little touches that come from long experience or are the result of sudden inspiration.” Charles Simic writes movingly about his friend, the late poet Mark Strand, and their various schemes, from buying palazzos to founding a gastronomic poetry movement, for The New York Review of Books.
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Poetry of Surveillence
“Nuclear Chelsea Air Marshal infrastructure Ionosphere Burst.” You can thank the NSA for this haiku. The NSA Haiku Generator is a website that takes commonly flagged terms and turns them into poetry. Have fun messing up the NSA’s algorithms for a day.
Canonical Comics
The world’s great literature as comics and visuals. Though, as Steven Heller points out in The Atlantic, defining the canon is a contentious task, comics or no.
Brickjest
Infinite Jest may have “really taken on a foothold as the ‘novel of ideas’ of the late 20th and early 21st centuries” but now it’s also a “novel of legos,” courtesy of Kevin Griffith and his 11 year old son, Sebastian.
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J.R.R. Tolkien Traced “Morse” to “Walrus”
Jonathan Dent offers a fascinating look at one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most challenging assignments for the Oxford English Dictionary. Apparently as a young philologist, Tolkien was tasked with tracing the etymology of “walrus” – a tricky word “of disputed origin that had all but entirely replaced the earlier English name morse since its first appearance in English in the late 1600s.”
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