Happy weekend from the Mobley welcome committee
I’m coming down with a cold or something, so in lieu of the great-grandfather story I’d planned to tell, here’s a shot of my dad’s father, Grandpa Newton, standing with the rest of the committee to welcome Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959, home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. (Larger version here.)
She’s the one [...]
Wolcott from afar
James Wolcott, in Cape May this month, has been pondering shits, savagery, and Auchincloss, Katha Pollitt, and more, more, more.
The voice of Graham Greene
Previously unheard Graham Greene radio interviews shed new light on his work — and his eye strain and opium use. (Thanks, Dave Lull.)
Joel Turnipseed on Micawber’s of St. Paul
The love letters to independent bookstores continue. Below Joel Turnipseed, author of Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir and blogger at Hotel Zero, praises St. Paul’s Micawber’s.
Micawber’s, the last indie bookstore in the Twin Cities not owned by a millionaire best-selling author, is a little gem of a shop that has no need to [...]
It’s hard not to be happy, he used to say, in Buenos Aires
“The Insufferable Gaucho,” a translated story from the last book Roberto Bolaño delivered to his publisher, appears in the current New Yorker.
The end of unavailability
Blackberry = Crackberry? No, says Andrew O’Hagan. With crack you take breaks between puffs.
Shock treatment for hysteria to resume momentarily
Swell. The clock has rolled so far back on feminism that it is again hip to dismiss an “enraged, educated woman” as “Vagina dentata intellectualis.”
Weekly Christensen love
Kate Christensen, says OGIC, is “especially good at capturing what things look like seen through a glaze of pain.”
Sayrafiezadeh archives
Hey look: NPR interviewed Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2005. (See also “My cock feels full with the thought of you in my heart.”)
Marlon James’ Nobel predictions
“My seer/creepy dreadlocked guy quotient increased dramatically last year when I predicted that Orham Pamuk would win the Nobel Prize.”
Thank you, Mr. Roth
Philip Roth on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: “If anybody can lose 50 states for the Democrats, I think she can.”
Bipartisan legislation would keep library records private
A bipartisan group of Senators has introduced legislation intended to safeguard readers’ privacy by curbing abuse of the Patriot Act’s National Security Letter powers.
National Security Letters are administrative subpoenas that “give the government virtually unlimited access to electronic communications transactions records, including those of Internet service providers and public libraries. Recipients of NSLs are [...]
In the churchyard at Stinsford
A rumor persists that Thomas Hardy’s heart “was accidentally devoured by his housekeeper’s cat, and that the heart of a pig was buried in its place.” See also.
Tolstoy on Chekhov
Leo Tolstoy didn’t care for Anton Chekhov’s plays. “‘Where is the drama?‘ he is said to have complained about ‘Uncle Vanya.’”
Dale Peck revisits The Outsiders
Had S.E. Hinton not borrowed from the popular books of her time, would The Outsiders have slipped past censors and into the Y.A. canon?
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