“The problem is that young children have terrible taste and enjoy garbage. Another problem, which compounds the first problem, is that they want to hear the same books hundreds of times in a row. So for all the joys that storytime can offer, it frequently entails a kind of dismal self-abnegation that’s too excruciating even to describe as tedium—an actively painful sense of my precious time on earth being torn from my chest and tossed into a furnace.” Gabriel Roth writes about the terrible Poky Little Puppy for Slate, and his complaints pair well with Jacob Lambert‘s Millions series, “Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?” and “Again, I Ask…“
The Problem with the Poky Little Puppy
Taming the Land
David Gessner thinks Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey are more relevant than they’ve ever been. Why? Their stories about the West anticipated the California drought. At Salon, Gessner explains why, among other things, Stegner spent much of his life debunking Western individualism.
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How Many Spaces After A Period?
According to Slate: “Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.”
The Martian Chronicles
There is a robot on Mars. Mars! And it has a Twitter account.
When James met Wilde
Oscar Wilde: a “fatuous fool,” a “tenth-rate cad,” and an “unclean beast?” According to Henry James, all of the above.
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“We need a theory of jerks.”
“Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks?” If so–as this insightful if somewhat confidence-shattering piece at Aeon suggests–the jerk may be you.
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“Tell me: am I too distant”
Recommended Reading: Two poems – “Bottle Curve” and “Self-Portrait as Q Source” – by Justin Carter.
In Brief
Leave it to the Paris Review to come up with this amazing contest: send them your “most self-seriously bookish” photo for a chance to win a Frank Clegg briefcase.
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