It’s fitting in a strange way that the author of Being There is now the subject of an oddball novel-turned-biography. In the Times, Benjamin Markovits reads Jerome Charyn’s book Jerzy, which gives the life of Jerzy Kosinski a treatment he’d likely appreciate.
There Now
From Wharton to Woolf
Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
Dangerous Minds
Sex ed for teenagers is a famously knotty subject, which explains why Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s children’s ombudsman, wants to eschew sex ed classes in favor of literature courses. “It is unacceptable to allow things that could corrupt children,” he said in a television interview. “The best sex education that exists is Russian literature.” (No word yet on what he thinks of Crime and Punishment.) (h/t The Paris Review)
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Scrubbing Facebook
Adrian Chen spoke with a former Facebook employee, and learned “how Facebook censors the dark content it doesn’t want you to see, and the people whose job it is to make sure you don’t.” In short: exploitation of “human content monitors” in the third world.
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The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot
“[M]ore people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art.” Who other than T.S. Eliot could get away with questioning the artistic quality of Hamlet?
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Harvey Pekar
Guernica has excerpted Harvey Pekar’s posthumous Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, which is out just today.
“You will only ever need two good outfits.”
Fellow young people! Do you yearn to be a writer? Are you looking for advice? Well, The Guardians author Sarah Manguso has tons to give.
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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell No More
US Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Geata and her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlaic Snell, showed that, indeed, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is dead. The couple shared a kiss in the Navy tradition: winning a raffle for the first kiss on the pier after a ship returns from sea.
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Young Fandom
Dominic Umile recalls his directionless 20s spent working menial jobs, reading Ray Bradbury, and the day his hero wrote him back.
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