Time has flown and I’ve neglected the roundup. This may be very anti-climactic, but here are some pieces I got a kick out of this week:
I just read Virginia Heffernan’s last column in the New York Times Magazine – for the past four years she’s been surveying the transition from analog to digital culture. She writes on the new Amazon Kindle series of narrative nonfiction works, called Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length, and the precious protection e-books (like “real” books) afford from the cloying commercialism of the Web:
When the iPhone first appeared, followed by the Kindle and then the iPad, it became clear that e-books and apps provided a way to siphon the resources of the Internet to individuals, who could now sample that energy without having to be vulnerable to the Web’s commercialism. That was an enormous breakthrough. Anyone who’s honest with herself knows that the Web stopped being a great place for consumers of culture a year or two ago. You think you’re reading the Web these days, but it’s reading you — gathering data on you, trying to sell you stuff, pushing you to other links. On the Web, reading is shopping. And sometimes you don’t want to shop.
I liked this piece on an early David Foster Wallace novel called The Broom of the System from The Rumpus’ “The Last Book I Loved” column. It was written by Tori Schacht, whose blog you can find here.
This is a nice little piece about Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings on the NYRBlog by someone who’s actually written an entire book on the subject. I’ve owned her Collected Poems for years, but I only recently learned the watercolor on the cover is hers.
The American photographer Edward Steichen was also a horticulturalist!
You can hear Charles Simic read two short poems here.
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