March 2012
19 posts
“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and...”
– In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell digs straight to the core. We all eat, suckling from birth until the day we die. Our need for food connects and divides us, access to it or desperation for it moves the world. Politics, poetry, crime, civilization, revolution are built on plates of food. ...
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“More fetching than a girl with a dragon tattoo has always been a girl with a...”
– Dwight Garner, our new crush, in his Sunday piece, “The Way We Read Now.” (via classicpenguin)
sincerelyyo asked: Not a question, but an answer in contemporary female essayists : I like Molly Young, e.g. her piece on Adderall in n+1
annawiener asked: Hi Sam! I've been really into essays/nonfiction recently, but I've noticed that my favorite writers -- Geoff Dyer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Tom Bissell, Wells Tower, David Foster Wallace, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Eliot Weinberger -- are all male. Can you recommend any female authors who are currently doing similar things in terms of style & content (writing long-form, slightly meandering,...
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Call Me Ishmael
“Moby-Dick” has inspired many folks to do many things, from students who have pulled their hair out over it to landlubbers who have gone on sea adventures. Patrick Shea, an elementary-school teacher who lives in Brooklyn, has embarked on a singularly eccentric endeavor: over the past three years, he wrote one song for each of the book’s hundred and thirty-six chapters. He recorded them, posted...
By the by
Tonight’s event with Stephanie Vaughn and Tea Obreht has been canceled due to illness. We’re trying to reschedule.
In happier news, our event with Eleanor “Up the Punx” Henderson has been rescheduled for Monday, March 12th.
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“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call...”
– Moby-Dick, Melville (via kelsfjord)
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jamiatt:
I wrote down a bunch of things Jonathan Franzen said at his reading at Tulane last night. Here is part of his response to a question about social networking:
“It’s a free country. People can do whatever they want within the law, and even some things not within the law…I personally was on Facebook for two weeks as part of a piece of journalism I was writing — it seemed sort of...
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