“In the end, no special effects, dazzling displays, augmented realities, or multimodal cross-platform designs substitute for content. Scholarship, good scholarship, the work of a lifetime commitment to working in a field — mapping its references, arguments, scholars, sources, and terrain of discourse — has no substitute.” Johanna Drucker writes about both the importance and the inherent difficulty of scholarly publishing for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Pixel Dust”
DFW on Writing Nonfiction
“I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one, and most of the pieces in there were assigned to me by Harper’s, with these sort of maddening instructions of, you know, just go to a certain spot and kind of, you know, turn 350 degrees a few times and tell us what you see.” Tom Scocca posts a five-part transcript of a phone interview he did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998. (Thanks, Nick.)
Coming to a Bookstore Near You
Check out this clever book trailer for the debut novel House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni.
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On the 33
Recommended reading: “One of the drillers fell to his knees. Some sobbed, in the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born.” An exceptional and deeply moving long-form essay in the New Yorker recounting the 69 days spent underground by the famed ’33’ Chilean miners buried in the 2010 accident at Copiapó.
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What They Share
At The Rumpus, our own Nick Ripatrazone writes about his twin daughters, Amelia and Olivia, who taught him that, when it comes to twins, “there are two babies but three identities: one for each baby, and then the twin identity, an amorphous, shared mass of personality and action that makes Amelia fuss one night and Olivia the next.” The essay nicely complements Nick’s Millions piece on Andre Dubus.
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Tidy Little Man
To date, Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie, is the only fictional character to get his own obit in the Times. At the LARB, Rumblr editor Molly McArdle looks back on Poirot, the very long-running TV series that ended on November 13th. (h/t The Rumpus)
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Keeping Present the Forgotten
Recommended reading: The Believer interviews Claudia Rankine about Citizen: An American Lyric, the relationship between art and literature and the importance of “keeping present the forgotten bodies.”
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