“They’re pictures, not images; displays, not shots; illustrations, not compositions. They are respectful displays of performance—of the demonstrative theatrical antics into which Anderson lets his performers lapse.” Richard Brody on the film version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
Not Scenes
The Naipaul Test
V.S. Naipaul (seemingly a professional misogynist at times) rankled many by suggesting there are no women writers that can equal him and calling Jane Austen "sentimental." Now the Guardian offers up a quiz that challenges readers to identify the gender of an author simply by reading a passage of his or her writing.
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Davis Illustrated
Check out an illustrated adaptation of Lydia Davis’s “In a House Besieged” by Roman Muradov at The Paris Review Daily. Pair with a piece on Davis’s short short stories and Twitter.
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Lunch Break
"Today I ate my shame, regurgitated it as a self-disgust, and digested it again as indolence. Known in the physical world as udon noodles with shrimp tempura," Teddy Wayne told VICE. He and other writers (including our own Emily St. John Mandel) were profiled on what they eat for lunch. On the side: famous writers' favorite snacks (Lord Byron liked to drink vinegar.)
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Burying the Hatchet
"The Hatchet Job Award appeals, in its depressingly calculated way, to the basest and most self-serving of journalistic instincts, and seems to arise out of, and perpetuate, a misunderstanding of what criticism actually is." At Slate, our own Mark O'Connell criticizes the award for promoting the same bad criticism it claims to detest.
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Graphic Novelists
HTMLGiant's Jimmy Chen follows up his "Author venn diagram" with a "Men matrix" and a "Women matrix."
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Georges Perec also remembers
George Perec's I Remember, a series of aphoristic memories modeled after Joe Brainard's volume of the same name, are finally making their way into English translation. The Paris Review has an excerpt. "I remember that Stendhal liked spinach... I remember that one of the first decisions that de Gaulle took on coming to power was to abolish the belt worn with jackets in the military."