Sit down with Jessa Crispin, literary blogger and author, at The Rumpus.
Nothing Made Up
And on and on and on.
Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (a book length study of Celine Dion‘s megablockbusting album of the same name), revisits the enduring and sort of nauseating classic from Titanic‘s soundtrack in The Atlantic.
Spoiling Infinite Jest
There are three kinds of readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: those who feel some niggling guilt about that brick on their bookshelf, those who’ve read it (proudly) but secretly may have no idea what happened in that tangled ending, and the people responsible for this excellent infographic. (Complement with cached commentary at Infinite Summer and a guide to the geography of Wallace’s Boston.)
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The mind of a writer
Scientists confirmed recently that writers are more likely to struggle with mental illness (sometimes, as recently noted, due to syphilis). Since we’re so used to our alcoholic literary greats, and a smattering of suicidal ones (Plath, Woolf, Thompson, Wallace–and many more), this comes as no great surprise. On a happier note, a new study using fMRIs and MFA students has found that writers show different brain patterns than “normal people” just writing: in fact they resemble “expert” thinking patterns of all professionals doing what they’re best at–musicians, athletes, competitive Scrabble players. I don’t know if I’m happier to learn the fMRIs found no gaping black holes, or that MFAs do in fact teach you something.
Not notable?!
A Nicholson Baker essay on Wikipedia and its pleasures (and its frustrations), has resurfaced in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
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I’m Sorry?
In his review of Mike Goldsmith’s Discord and Katherine Bouton’s Shouting Won’t Help, Roger Clark Miller (of Mission of Burma) wonders how our world got louder. His analysis? Our use of loud noise as a weapon had something to do with it.
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