Recommended Reading: Poet and novelist Carmen Boullosa on her obsession with lost stories and found textual objects, as well as the efficacy of rereading.
Remembering What We Forgot
“Only two people?”
In 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky met Charles Dickens… Or did he? In a thoroughly researched piece for the Times Literary Supplement, Eric Naiman tells the thrilling story of how one – or two? or several? – hoaxers managed to dupe biographers, New York Times reviewers, London Review of Books editors as well as readers of numerous scholarly publications. Long story short: be wary of ostentatious “nipple” references.
●
●
Dating Woody
Diane Keaton writes in her upcoming memoir, Then Again, that “Going out with Woody Allen was like being in a Woody Allen movie.”
●
●
Pervasive Poetry
“Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost’s poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, ‘The Road Not Taken’ appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse.” David Orr writes for The Paris Review about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” one of the most misread poems of the English language.
●
●
Know Your Facial Hair Etymology
Did you know sideburns got their name from the extravagant facial hair of a 19th century American soldier by the name of Ambrose E. Burnside?
●
●
Some New Releases: Kingsolver, Pynchon, Plath
Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Update: There’s a new edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation too.
●
●
Zuccotti Park: Day 10
An n+1 writer revisits Zuccotti Park to find Michael Moore reporting for MSNBC on the tenth day of the protest against financial inequity.
●
●