Anyone who’s ever forgotten a million-dollar idea will attest to the maddening tendency of the subconscious to forget things. For many people, this extends to dreams, where the best ideas can pop up and die before the morning. But why is it so difficult to remember them? At Salon, the neuroscience behind our chronic inability to remember dreams. Related: Blake Butler’s innovative Year in Reading piece.
Dreamland
Writ Large
"Welcome to another night in the life of Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court justice, current queen of the best-seller list and suddenly the nation’s most high-profile Hispanic figure. She may be a relative newcomer to national life, plucked from circuit-court obscurity less than four years ago. But the release of her new memoir, My Beloved World, suggests that she has broader ambitions than her colleagues, to play a larger and more personal role on the public stage."
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Top 3 Reasons Why You Need to Read Mark O’Connell’s Latest
1. The listicle is "the house style of a distracted culture.”
2. Our own Mark O'Connell writes about the ubiquitous form for The New Yorker.
3. And fittingly, he writes about it in a list.
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The PEN World Voices Line-Up
PEN World Voices, the great annual festival of International Literature, unveils this year's lineup for the week of April 26, in New York and elsewhere. Highlights include Norman Rush, Patti Smith, László Krasznahorkai, Rodrigo Frésan, and Sherman Alexie's "Freedom to Write" lecture.
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The anticipations of a Most Anticipated book
Not every worthy book finds the audience it deserves as quickly as Edan Lepucki's California. John Warner writes about the long aftermath of finding his debut, The Funny Man, featured in our 2011 Most Anticipated Book Preview: "I wondered, what if? Maybe this was going to be the next phase of my life, and when people asked me what I did, I’d say that I wrote novels." His new collection of short stories is Tough Day for the Army.
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The YOLO Pages
This month, Boost House is publishing what the New Yorker describes as “the first English-language paperbound anthology of Alt Lit and its siblings weird Twitter … and Flarf.” The collection – The YOLO Pages – features work by Steve Roggenbuck, Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, and (of course) @Horse_ebooks among others. But far from being a compendium of “vomit jokes and image macros of cats,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith, the book also contains poems “that obliquely grapple with bigger issues of morality, politics, feminism, capitalism, and the environment.”
Wells Tower on Your TV Screen
Talk about burying the lede. This article about Alec Baldwin’s return to television acting, and how he’ll be playing “a Rob Ford-type mayor of New York,” doesn’t make a big deal out of the show’s pilot writer. But it should. Because his name is Wells Tower.
Internet Tendency, Redesigned
The charmingly lo-fi McSweeney's website gets a redesign and manages to stay charmingly lo-fi.