Originally, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey included more narration by co-writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose short story “The Sentinel” was the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s script. At the last minute, Kubrick decided to cut them out, which led to Clarke leaving the US premiere halfway through. In a piece for The New Statesman an old friend of Clarke’s explores his side of the story. You could also read Ted Gioia on a weirdly predictive ’60s sci-fi novel.
In the Dark (of Space)
Stop Reading this Post Right Now
Get off the internet and read a book. Research has shown that deep reading (slow, immersive reading) is like an exercise for our brains that can enable us to be more empathetic.
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Poet and Magician
One of the titans of Modernist poetry, Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. to her friends, was psychoanalyzed in the 1930s by none other than Sigmund Freud. Her letters to her friends describe the account in great detail, despite explicit instructions from Freud not to speak about their time together with anyone. This essay from The Millions on video games and Freud is a nice complementary piece.
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Here Refrain
Beautiful, shimmer, jetty. Poets Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Robert Pinsky et al. tell Merriam-Webster about their favorite words. Related, and far less pretty: the most-looked-up words post-election include fascism, bigot, and xenophobe.
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Loyal Opposition
Widely linked to already, but worth reading: James Wood on A.S. Byatt‘s The Children’s Book in the LRB. A mixed review that nonetheless makes me want to read the book is, for me, one mark of a good critic.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gyasi; Alam; Schine; Rowley; King
Out this week: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi; Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam; They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine; Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley; and End of Watch by Stephen King. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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“The Migrant is Not A Metaphor”
Over at The New York Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reviews two books about migration, A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.