In response to the Bookends question, “What is the Best Portrayal of a Marriage in Literature?,” Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes movingly about the poetry of Jack Gilbert and concludes that “this is marriage: not knowing one’s wife but constantly relearning her, not possessing her but rediscovering her, constantly finding a new beloved within the already familiar spouse.” For a slightly different perspective on marriage in literature, look no further than our own Matt Seidel‘s “Survey of Literature’s Non-Traditional Marriage Proposals.”
Marriage in Literature
“When it gets loudly, IT GETS VERY LOUD INDEED”
Have you Yanks seen BBC‘s 6-episode series cum feature film The Trip? If not, your interest will be piqued by this clip of the show’s main characters doing their best Michael Caine impressions. It’s on Netflix if you’re into laughter, merriment, and that sort of thing.
Rise of the Neuronovel
“As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.” Marco Roth questions the rise of the “neuronovel” at n+1.
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Unearthing Neruda
20 unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda were recently discovered. You can read one (in Spanish) over here. The poems will be published in Chile this year, and in Spain next year. Meanwhile, a local judge is not quite ready to abandon his probe into whether or not Neruda was poisoned – a theory that’s been reported for quite some time now.
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Building the Library of Utopia
Google ran into a wall of litigation when it tried to create a public digital archive of every book in the world. Now a team of academics is taking on the challenge. Nicholas Carr examines whether Robert Darton and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society can succeed where Silicon Valley failed. Also be sure to check out our review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
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Elif Batuman: Get a Real Degree
Elif Batuman’s provocative essay “Get a Real Degree” is up at the London Review of Books: “Despite the recent trend in viewing fiction as a form of empathy training, I’m pretty sure that writing short stories isn’t the most efficient way to combat injustice or oppression.”