A while back, I linked to a contentious letter between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, written not long after Bellow found out Ludwig was sleeping with his wife. Now, here’s a (somewhat) less angry piece of correspondence, sent from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym. Sample quote: “Has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always unhappy?”
“Depressing day”
David Mitchell on The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech is the first film to portray my speech defect realistically, says novelist David Mitchell.
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“Everything is handmade.”
Monologuist Mike Daisey was once devoted to Apple products. Then, one day, he "started to think, and that's always a problem for any religion." He began to question how his favorite products were put together, so he traveled to China with hopes of finding out. What he saw was shocking. If you own an Apple device (which I'm betting you do), you need to listen to this episode of This American Life.
A Bit Rusty
Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this -- who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prose pick greats that are no longer great.
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Occupy Lessons
Does Washington D.C. still have enough revolutionary spirit to drive the Occupy movement to the impossible-to-ignore phase of Resurrection City? Even after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, his message of economic equality presses on.
Agoraphobia
As part of his research for his recent treatise on office life, Cubed, n + 1 editor Nikil Saval looked back on his own years in an open office. In an interview with Sara Scribner, he talks about his growing awareness that it wasn’t good for his health: “It was sociable in some good senses, but also mostly not a pleasant place to be.”
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