“Now I get paid to do something I have loved since I was 4 years old. Other than my family, is there anything else I have loved so unconditionally, for so long?” Georgia Cloepfil in N+1 on the uncompromising, compromised life of the professional female athlete. See also: some thoughts about hosting the World Cup.
The Ball Is a Woman
Another View
“But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion.”
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Please Be Quiet, Please
Recommended Reading: This essay from The Rumpus on total noise and total silence, touching on everyone from Mikhail Zoshchenko to Don DeLillo.
Describing Art as an Art Form
Recommended: Matthew Monteith’s series of photographs showing people explaining artworks.
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Remembering the Novel
If novels are written to remind us of our mistakes and we keep repeating those mistakes, why read novels at all?, asks Alberto Manguel. Richard Lea discusses authors’ views on the relationship between the novel and memory at The International Forum on the Novel.
Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.