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There’s an obituary in the Times for folklorist Tristam Coffin that’s worth reading. One opinion he held I’m discounting as a folklorist instance of the principle “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” He apparently wrote that Daisy Buchannon of The Great Gatsby was “a Jazz Age incarnation of [...]  Luc Sante, reviewing the second collection of William S. Burroughs’s letters, quotes a letter to Truman Capote, “prompted by his distaste for “In Cold Blood” and for the fact that Capote did nothing to save his subjects from capital punishment”: You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. [...] You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, [...] From the opening of the short story, “The Snatching of Bookie Bob.” Now, it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this [...] It is well known that Damon Runyon was fascinated with the underworld characters hanging out in saloons on Broadway during prohibition. I was unaware he was also fascinated with tripe. From the start of the story “Blonde Mink”: Now of course there are many different ways of cooking tripe but personally I prefer it [...] This is from Damon Runyon’s story of the racehorse tout’s life, “Pick the Winner,” which is set at the height of the depression. Hot Horse Herbie suggests to Miss Cutie Singleton that she get out the old crystal ball and her deck of cards, and hang out her sign as a fortuneteller while they [...] The announcement that David Milch (Deadwood, NYPD Blue) and HBO have acquired a first option to adapt any of 19 Faulkner novels and 125 short stories was met primarily with the question: Which ones should he adapt? Slate did a whole piece on it, asking authors Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and others which they [...] Jesmyn Ward, who was the John Grisham writer last year, won the National Book Award for her novel Salvage the Bones, which is her second novel. She read a part of it on Thacker Mountain just before it was published. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Post review: This trim, fiercely poetic novel takes [...] I had a New Years resolution to read a book a week, and, sometime in April, a long trial messed that up. I’ll hope to finish the year at half that rate, but am continuing to post notes about what I’m reading. Here are a few new ones. The last two are pretty recently [...] This is from Anna Laetitia Barbauld‘s Lessons for Children. The title page of an 1801 edition is pictured above. There was a naughty boy; I do not know what his name was, but it was not Charles, nor George, nor Arthur, for those are all very pretty names: but there was a robin came in [...] |
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