“What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?” Nicholas Dames answers with an essay in The New Yorker.
Consider the Chapter
Rote She Wrote
At The NYT Mag, Virginia Heffernan‘s “Drill, Baby, Drill” explores the possibility that drills and memorization might not be quite as oppressive as some of the kinder, gentler pedagogues of our time suggest and offers a list of aps to help aspiring rote learners (Nota Bene: VerseByHeart).
A New Struggle
A new, annotated edition of Mein Kampf is slated for release sometime next week, and it’s already poised to be a bestseller in Germany. The edition, which aims to “unmask his false allegations, whitewashing and outright lies,” will debut at number 20 on the bestseller list after increased demand bumped the initial print run up to 15,000 copies.
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It Is Shark Week, After All
Bret Easton Ellis is collaborating with Taxi Driver director Paul Schrader on a new “psychological horror” movie about sharks. Coincidentally, HTMLGiant‘s Blake Butler just revisited Ellis’ infamous novel American Psycho.
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Print Culture
“At its core, the New York newspaper strike was a battle over technology. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of computerized typesetting systems that would revolutionize the newspaper composing room…Today, new technology is again shaking American newspapers as the Internet drains away more and more advertising revenue. Cities with dailies may soon face a newspaper blackout much darker than what New York experienced a half-century ago. For a brief period, New York was a laboratory that demonstrated what can happen when newspapers vanish,” writes Scott Sherman at Vanity Fair.
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No Moral Order
Recommended Reading: On James Sallis, criminally under-read American crime writer and contemporary paranoid, whose novels we should definitely be talking about.
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Ernest Hemingway in Cuba
A restoration center has opened on Hemingway's property in Cuba, with holdings that include manuscripts, letters, and photographs.
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