Faulkner’s ghost likes to write on walls and scurrilously wander the grounds, to scare off all the Ole Miss students making out in the woods behind his house (ghosts are always grumpy).
“Writing a novel takes so long”: Authors in TV
Have the nerdy, quiet reader-types morphed into the cool kids, and are they now trying to take part in (or take over) a medium they once felt symbolically rejected by?
The Presidents of the United States of America, Sorted Into Hogwarts Houses
42. Bill Clinton – Slytherin
43. George W. Bush – Hufflepuff
44. Barack Obama – Ravenclaw
Talkin’ Death Mask Immortality Blues
I hold a quarter up to the mask of Washington and I see discrepancies. Maybe I see a pattern of discrepancies. But do I see meaning?
Reading in Transit (Some Notes)
Last weekend, I flew to Chicago for my father’s 60th birthday. I wanted to spy on my fellow Southwest travelers’ books, but everyone had a Kindle or an iPad so I can’t tell you what people flying from LA to Chicago were reading.
Full Stop at Hofstra University
Full Stop Contributing Editors Michael Schapira and David Backer will be giving a talk about French philosopher Jacques Ranciere tomorrow at 2:55 PM. Howard Dean will also be there, obviously.
We were young, it was beautiful
I rushed to the newsstand to snatch up a copy of the New York Times on the day after Barack Obama was elected President. I thought I would treasure that document forever because it would remind me of a moment of collective triumph. But you can never be sure how the past will look from the future.
People haven’t gotten that far protesting individual issues, because in this sea of laws we live in, there are five to replace the one you get overturned, and the very thing being protested is the totality of the system of economic oppression.
“If You Could Have Seen Her, It Was True”
But what if, in the worst-case scenario, Franzen is right? What if Wallace’s nonfiction dishonestly earns its prefix? For me, nothing really changes.
The question that concerns me the most is not why read Moby-Dick?, but why read Why Read Moby-Dick? I’m still trying to decide whether the fact that this book exists is even a positive thing.