Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz talks about his new book Mad Men Carousel and why audiences felt such a profound attachment to the protagonists. Despite their flaws, Seitz argues that it is the consistency in their behavior that endeared us to characters like Don and Betty, literal misfits though they were. Still having trouble admitting the show is over? This may help.
Bad Men
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Writer Manjula Martin has been a stock girl, used bookseller, seamstress, waitress, retailer, Girl Friday- just to name a few of her day jobs. She questions the value of the artist’s day job in her VQR post. “Why are writers so eager to leave work behind?” she writes.
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Love Advice from Chaucer
“Ich am Geoffrey Chaucer, and my litel poeme the Parliament of Foweles was the first to combyne the peanut buttir of Februarye the XIVth wyth the milk chocolate of wooing. And so Ich feel responsible to helpe wyth sum advyce on thys daye.” Love advice from Chaucer, via NPR.
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Tomorrow!
This past week GOOD laid off most of their editorial staff, including former Executive Editor and creator of the #realtalk From Your Editor tumblog Ann Friedman. Posting some extra #realtalk on her blog yesterday, Friedman announced that the band of former GOOD editors are looking for work and also launching their own magazine: Tomorrow.
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The Salman Rushdie Channel
Slate’s got a video interview with Salman Rushdie in three parts, and his speaking agency has released a rare video from one of Rushdie’s previously unrecorded talks, where the man describes writers as much more vulnerable than ideas.
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Fiction Friction
“There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date,” Philip Roth said in an interview with Cynthia Haven for Stanford’s The Book Haven. Besides his retirement from writing, Roth also discussed why he doesn’t consider himself an American-Jewish writer and his book The Ghost Writer. For more Roth, read our essay on lessons you can learn from his work.
Curiosities
Both Ed and the Washington Post interview Tobias Wolff on the occasion of the release of his new collection, Our Story Begins.Bookride chronicles some of the most unlikely and amazing discoveries in the history of book collecting. In part one, he discusses many runners-up – including “An incredible collection of modern first editions, mostly fine in jackets turned up in the 1980s in a shed in the Australian desert causing dealers to fly in from New York, Berkeley and Santa Barbara.” Part two covers the greatest find. It begins “In 1907, during his second expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Sir Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, encountered a monk who showed him a hoard of manuscripts preserved in a cave near Dunhuang.”In BOMB, Zachary Lazar and Christopher Sorrentino discuss Lazar’s book Sway. Lazar appeared in our Year in Reading.You may have to wait ten years for the rest of it, but Junot Diaz gives readers a sneak peak at his next novel at Omnivoracious.Baseball predictions, highly personalized.J.K. Rowling, now retired from writing about a boy wizard, has embarked on the next step of her career, protecting her legacy. First up is a lawsuit against a companion book written by a superfan librarian. But, as the Times seems to indicate with its account of the trial, that way madness lies: “The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm – and haircut – of Harry Potter. Even his name sounds like that of a character in one of the books, if preceded by “Lord” or “Master.” Although, at 50, he is older than Ms. Rowling, 42, he looked like a schoolboy, with an unlined face and caramel-colored hair parted down the middle.”
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