“New houses get built, and new songs are sung … and I am the same, in the same trembling state.” Things are not going very well at the newly built Federico García Lorca center in Granada, Spain. Patience is wearing thin as members of the García Lorca Foundation continue tangling with government officials over control of the center, which is intended to house nearly 20,000 items — manuscripts, drawings, musical compositions and artworks valued at more than 20 million euros.
When Five Years Pass
Ask Ayn (Rand)
“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
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“Immaculate glass world of the spirit”
Recommended Reading: Anka Muhlstein on Stefan Zweig (whose work, you may have heard, inspired Wes Anderson’s latest film).
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Talking with Konstantin Kakaes
In the Tank, the blog of the New America Foundation, has a new interview up with Konstantin Kakaes, author of the latest e-book from The Millions. Among other things, he talks about what he would do if he ran NASA -- "bring back a piece of Mars" -- and mentions that the Voyager spacecrafts will keep sending signals back to Earth until at least the year 2025.
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La Buena Educacion
At The Paris Review Daily, Pedro Almodóvar tallies the elements of cinematic comedy, which include good timing, “rapid-fire dialogue” and rehearsals that draw out spontaneous performances from actors.
“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…”
Michael Chabon takes on Finnegans Wake in The New York Review of Books. This is mandatory reading, class.
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Julie & Julia Revisited
Julie Powell "masters the art of French cooking" on her iPad.
Our Unhappy Marriage Will Be Revived in Paris
"I Have Inherited The Ancestral Home, But It Is Now A Burden Rather Than A Gift, Which Reminds Me Of Another Burden…The Institution Of Marriage" and every other Modernist novel ever written, via Mallory Ortberg of The Toast.