Recommended Reading: On Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and the art of hiding one’s feelings — whether helpful or detrimental.
Little Emotions in the Person
Curiosities: Pretend Lunch
In Open Letters, Sam Sacks writes "Quietude is godliness in Lark & Termite" and traces Faulkner's influence on the new book.n+1 on the 10th anniversary of Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time": "After her came the deluge: the end of the record industry as we know it, yes, but also the end of America as it used to conceive of itself."Soft Skull's Richard Nash on how to publish in a recession at Conversational Reading.William Safire on "the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth." Millions reader Scott says, "I wish the Book Review would do a LOT more of this kind of stuff."The Internet is amazing I: J! Archive, "The fan-created archive of Jeopardy! games and players - 160,032 clues and counting!"The Internet is amazing II: The NY Times has a crossword puzzle blog.Maud Newton in Granta: "Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.""Sometimes, instead of eating alone, I pretend I'm having lunch with American literary legends. Today's pretend guest was Cormac McCarthy."Is MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville "the best Civil War novel ever?" (via)At Jacket Copy, Carolyn discovers Faulkner and Delillo in the Sports Illustrated archive.Sara Paretsky: "My editor tells me this is the last time the company will let her send me a marked manuscript."Jenny Davidson on her special pencils.Dan Radosh exposes yet another tired journalistic cliche.The novel of manners, with zombies:: Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesIn praise of the long sentence. (Hear, hear!)
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Apocalypse Patriots
In The New Statesman, Ben Marcus wonders why American writers are so obsessed with the apocalypse. (A sentiment a few others have wondered of late, too.)
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Elephant’s Memory
Over at Aeon, Alana Massey writes about memory and how the internet archives personal data. In her own words, “Because the archiving technology captures only snapshots of a site at a given time, results might not be an exact replica of the site as it was. As I learned from the fragments of our site, things such as embedded media might be missing and scripts are unlikely to work. After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory.”
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Walk, Don’t Run
Haruki Murakami retired his running shoes to walk to Kobe and rediscover his hometown. "Strictly speaking, it’s not my home town any more. I feel a deep sense of loss at this fact, as if the axis of my memories is faintly, but audibly, creaking within me. It’s a physical sensation," he writes in an essay for Granta.
Fright Night
Canada's famous Nightmares Fear Factory is setting the tone for Halloween with its hysterical Flickr stream of spooked guests.