Recommended Reading: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview. (FYI, you can read an excerpt of Nguyen’s latest book over at Bloom.)
Much to Sympathize With
Curiosities: No Glamour in Publishing
Want to catch up on John Updike in a single summer?Dick Cavett reminisces about the time Updike and John Cheever appeared on his talk show… together.Clancy Martin on his failed attempt to become the world’s largest maker of Fauxbergé eggs and how he evaded the Russian police.Ward Sutton literalizes the idea of the cartoonish critique at the Barnes & Noble Review. First up: T.C. Boyle’s The Women.Street artists smell a conspiracy around the recent arrest of “Hope”-monger Shepard Fairey, the artist formerly known as Giant.On the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran, our friend Porochista Khakpour looks back.WNYC presents streaming audio (mp3 link) of Zadie Smith’s NYPL talk on then-President-elect Obama.Fresh Air’s Maureen Corrigan raves about Yu Hua’s Brothers.More heads roll in the publishing industry.How close did we come to economic apocalypse?Glamorous publishing people: “No, there is no glamour left in publishing.”Food for your ears: “The Dinner Party Download is a fast and funny ‘booster shot’ of unconventional news, cuisine and culture to help you win this weekend’s dinner party.” Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a recent guest.Amid stimulus package largess, arts getting left out in the cold.Epilogue, a new mag that marries short writings, art, and music.File under: links you probably don’t need to click on
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“The muscle that helps you ignore people with bad advice”
“The greatest mistake the American writer ever made was asking everybody else what they thought of their writing. Look around your current writing workshop. Look right and left. Most of those people will stop writing. Because it’s too hard, they have no ideas, no one understands them, whatever. A few of those failed people will become editors. These are the only people in the room who should ever really matter to you.”
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On the Rise of the Mass Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia has been growing larger and more democratic for hundreds of years, but the spread of today’s mass intelligentsia “is arguably happening on a far larger scale,” writes Philosophy For Life author Jules Evans.
Modernist Myth Making
A look at how H. D.‘s interpretation of Helen of Troy differs from the traditional.
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Landlines, as Seen in Nabokov, Kafka, and More
Sophie Haigney bids farewell to the presence of landlines in literature, which have made important appearances in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, and more.
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Gold in the New Millennium
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower tracks the Klondike’s modern gold rush in his typically comprehensive way.
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Protest? I Would Prefer Not To.
In October 2011, Hannah Gersen convincingly argued that the Occupy Wall Street protests bore more than a few similarities to Bartleby, The Scrivener. Now, amid the political demonstrations going on throughout Turkey, Millions contributor Kaya Genç draws a similar parallel between Istanbul’s “Standing Man” and Herman Melville’s famous protagonist.