The traveling impulse
Pico Iyer says Maugham, a “classic traveler,” disguised his hunger for romance and broke every rule of travel writing. (Via.)
Pico Iyer says Maugham, a “classic traveler,” disguised his hunger for romance and broke every rule of travel writing. (Via.)
“The movie Keats [talks] the way the real Keats wrote. But does he talk the way the real Keats talked?” (Via.)
I’m in the minority, I gather, but my favorite of Henry James’ novellas is probably The Aspern Papers, what with all the narrator’s scheming, the old woman’s secrecy, and the delicious melodrama of the finale. (The book centers on a biographer who’s determined to uncover a dead poet’s rumored love letters.) So I got a kick out of this passage . . .
Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker created the Significant Objects project earlier this year to prove the theory that a writer could invest an otherwise worthless object with value by making up a story about it. That’s my object, above, and you can find out its (invented) provenance at the Significant Objects site. A preview: This astonishing “Cracker Barrel” artifact appears . . .