This week in book-related infographics, round 2: Lapham’s Quarterly takes a look at the day jobs of famous authors, among them T.S. Eliot, who was responsible for processing reports on German debt, and Charlotte Bronte, who had laundry fees deducted from her pay. Pair with our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s essay on “Working the Double Shift” and “all the strangely varied occupations that a person accumulates when the primary objective is not to establish a career, per se, but just to pay the rent while they’re working on a novel.”
Day Jobs
Founding Father, Remixed
George Washington as you’ve never seen him before: First, a cartoon entitled “Cox and Combs” and second, a live action avant garde take on the founding father.
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Say It Loud
At Longform, you can find a nifty old essay, originally published in 1990 in The Missouri Review, in which Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace pay a visit to a pioneering rap studio.
More Than Light
“Romance heroines hold jobs. They teach, farm, practice law, work independently as private detectives, or they are involved in the arts, in dance, in theater. They are mothers, ex-wives, Marines. They take up causes and they always want something ‘more’ from their lives—and we aren’t just talking about a partner. In today’s romance, the relationship is part of—and often, a catalyst for—a woman’s journey, not her destination.” On the value of romance fiction.
Asterix Co-Creator Retires
Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, announced his retirement yesterday. Since 1977, Uderzo has been the sole author of the popular French comic books, which have sold over 350 million copies worldwide. His successor has yet to be named, though Uderzo said it will be an artist “who has been following us for a long time inside a studio I set up.”
Get Educated on SOPA
Tomorrow (January 18th), sites like Wikipedia and Reddit will go dark to protest SOPA. Anyone who’s been online over the past few weeks probably has a vague sense of why this proposed legislation is bad news for the internet as we know it, but Reddit has put up a blog post delving into the language and illustrating the frankly alarming ramifications of its passage.
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Is She a Betty or a Veronica?
Lena Dunham is the new voice of the Archie comics generation. The Girls creator will write four issues of the famous comic, coming out in 2015. She’s not the only woman joining the comics industry. DC Comics is adding a Native American teenage girl, inspired by the real Canadian Aboriginal teen activist Shannen Koostachin, to the Justice League United.
The Half-Windsor
Recommended Reading: Alex Myers’s essay “Just Like…” on Hobart. “I was seventeen, and I wanted to show him – and everyone else (most of all, myself) – that I could be a man on my own terms.”
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