"... were still a regular sight in the early Noughties. You could glimpse our kind on trains and in cafés: wan, bespectacled and dreamy, trailing after our parents, clutching our grubby, sticky copies of The Chronicles of Narnia or Northern Lights. It was the era of Philip Pullman, of Horrible Histories, of Artemis Fowl.
Above all, it was the age of Harry Potter, with its feverish midnight queues of miniature witches and wizards up past their bedtime to get their hands on the latest instalment (my sister and I went to the cavernous, warehouse-sized Borders bookshop at Silverlink Retail Park wearing bin bags for Hogwarts capes).... [A]s the age of print fades away and the angry, distractible age of the smartphone dawns, I think we find ourselves facing a post-literate world that will resemble the pre-literate world: less democratic, less rational and less enlightened...."
If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.
"... and whether, by writing about an actor who so closely resembles a real celebrity, Cusk has committed some kind of artistic betrayal.... Cusk seems bewildered, and a bit distressed, to find herself caught in the harsh spotlight of fame and the kind of tabloid feeding frenzy she evokes in the novel, which features an author who writes about a famous actress."
Cusk says: "It’s very stressful, the thought of these things happening.... It’s taking the novel that I’ve created into almost a sort of courtroom or a factual fight.... What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness....
"... in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In one horrifying example heard during his trial, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book.... 'In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing'...."
"I got to witness one of them a few weeks ago, when I attended a rare public screening of the provocative and polarizing 2003 flick 'Masked and Anonymous,' co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles. I hadn’t seen it before, but I immediately entered the cult of admirers who believe it was unfairly maligned when it was first released. (Roger Ebert called it 'a vanity production beyond all reason.' I hope Dylan chose to take that as a compliment.) I have also had the 'Masked and Anonymous' soundtrack on repeat — especially its eclectic assortment of Dylan covers by a global panorama of artists like the Sertab Erener, Francesco de Gregori and the Magokoro Brothers. You’ve never truly heard 'My Back Pages' until you’ve heard it in Japanese."
As for "Masked and Anonymous," I couldn't find it streaming anywhere. Meade, who's seen it twice, seems to think it's on YouTube, but here's a link to buy the DVD, if you still have a DVD player. It's only $9.48. Here's the trailer:
"It makes me cringe to watch video of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, fawning over him: 'We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world in terms of the research you do.' I’m gobsmacked that she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job."
Excerpt from the review: "As young Arday failed to hit his milestones, doctors declared him 'deficient' and said he was 'no better than a vegetable.' Arday was, by his own account, a profoundly intellectually disabled child. He claims that he could 'register sounds, but I couldn’t shape them into meaning.' He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases.... 'Most of my memories of my early childhood are of generalised images, sounds, sensations, feelings, rather than specific events, perhaps because language helps us to form memories, and I didn’t have access to that until I was older.'"
My son Chris, who's nearing the end of his project of reading biographies of all of the American Presidents, sends me very well-chosen snippets of things now and then.
"... who had prioritized physical strength in their daily routines.... There is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who in her book 'The Secret to Superhuman Strength' could not talk about fitness without also talking about her private history of romantic relationships and the role exercise played in managing stress and quashing depression.... The novelist Laura van den Berg turned to boxing to combat destructive anxiety patterns.... And I spoke with the poet Hanif Abdurraqib about how running... was about stress relief and managing clinical depression... In a recent interview with Haruki Murakami, the singer Harry Styles credited Mr. Murakami’s book on running with freeing him 'from the idea that music had to be an unhealthy profession and I had to be this tortured soul.'... These artists weren’t going on about perfect blood panels or maximum efficiency or tracking immense protein intake. They cared about feeling alive in their bodies, sleeping well and having the stamina to do meaningful work.... Rather than follow the voice of one supposed strongman, rattling off advice, I learned to favor a chorus...."
Langdell is rejecting the "fitness bros." He names a few of them — Peter Attia, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman — so aren't the bros, too, a "chorus"? The distinction is not between a "chorus" and "one supposed strongman" but between the practical rules you ought to follow to achieve better fitness and the psychological motivation to pursue it. I don't see why the "chorus" wouldn't include both voices. Even if you feel inspired by Harry and Haruki and Hanif to go running, you'd still want to know if running long or short and fast or slow is more beneficial to your body and your mind.
Even as Mr. Greenspan skillfully managed interest rates in a way that kept the economy humming along, he remained leery of confronting a danger he well recognized: that the low-inflation, easy-money environment he had helped create was putting the United States at risk by fueling unsustainable investment booms. And he remained reluctant to act as banks and investment firms adopted complex new trading techniques that would come to wreak great damage. At the Fed, he was remarkably successful at what he considered the central banker’s primary task of holding down inflation. He also helped the United States deal with periodic shocks, including a stock market crash just weeks after he took office, the near-meltdown of Asian financial markets a decade later and the aftereffects of the 2001 terrorist attacks....
I know Trump has demolished the old East Wing, so there's no taking a view from it right now, but Jill Biden purports to give readers a "View from the East Wing." That's the title. (And that's a commission-earned link.)
That's a "commission earned" link for the book, by the way. It comes out tomorrow. It's #1 at Amazon in the category "Sociology of Marriage and Family" and look at the competition:
Crazy stuff, no? Betty Friedan is still hanging on, there's something called "The Ethical Slut," and it's fits in "Marriage and Family," and why is orange the color of marriage? "Fair Play" is up there twice — once as a book and once as a deck of cards — but there's also "It Begins with You" and — clicking around — I'm confronted with....
The judgy comments are mostly resentful of Sedaris's wealth and his choice to spend what he has on art and on chairs that seem as if they might be uncomfortable.
And here's Sedaris's new collection of essays: "The Land and Its People" (commission earned). It came out 5 days ago. I've read it and will read it again and again. I love David Sedaris's voice and his books are, by far, my favorite book to listen to while falling asleep. But this new book won't work for that. It's got loud, aggressive clapping/percussion between the essays.
"She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem 'Paterson' wrote 'no ideas but in things.' This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of [a book] about Frank O’Hara. Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: 'right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.'"
Speaking of "no ideas but in things," we're told that, in her new memoir, her second, Jill Biden "marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as 'Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,' the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called 'my Monet.' ('Our Monet,' Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)"
I looked it up. Here's "Our Monet":
According to The White House Historical Association's Facebook page: "On December 4, 1963, the family of John F. Kennedy donated the painting 'A Morning on the Seine; Good Weather' to the White House collection in memory of the late president." That was 2 weeks after the assassination. I'm only noticing this painting now, because I'm reading about Jill and Donald verbalizing possessively about it. And now I feel as though I can see, in that fuzzy image, 2 profiles yelling at each other. And both look like Trump.
Oh! The derangement! An odor so sour and pungent....
ADDED: Did Trump say "my Monet"? It's hearsay — at least double hearsay. Jill Biden is asserting that Angela Merkel said that Trump said something. There's room for mishearing, misquoting, misinterpreting, and lying from Merkel (supposedly hearing Trump) and Biden (supposedly hearing Merkel) and from anyone else who's passed this statement along.
I don't believe any of it. She said that during the debate, as she watched it on TV, she thought he might be having a stroke and that he'd never acted like that before or since. Sorry. Not believed. I think the new book exists to be sold — to make money — and to try to escape responsibility for depriving the American people of the power to participate in the selection of the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential candidate.
"To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me," she says elsewhere in the book. Maybe he had rehearsed too much? Maybe he had traveled too much that month? Or was he just ill? The president had seemed exhausted earlier in the day and had told her that he was not feeling too well. Later, after positing that he may have unwittingly taken codeine cough syrup or Ambien to fight off a cold or to help him sleep, Jill Biden seems to rhetorically throw her hands in the air: "I only wish I had the answer."
"They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result was charges going back many years.
“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.
“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note reads.
“NO FUN," it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”
My initial take, on that text alone, was that doesn't sound like what he would write, but then what do I know about the writing style of Jeffrey Epstein? I haven't been reading his emails, and the NYT points to a 2016 email of his that says "whtchoo want me todo -- bust out cryin" — and what can I say? Do you want to talk about the "Watcha"/"whtchoo" discrepancy? Are you struck by the word-for-word repetition of a 7 or 8 word phrase? But which way are you struck? Are you thinking, yes, that's Jeffrey or somebody swiped a phrase to make it look like Jeffrey? But who?
ADDED: Why can't we be told which graphic novel Jeffrey Epstein had there in his cell to read? I invited Grok to guess — remember, it was the summer of 2019 — and this is what I got:
"... at [Brian] Jones’s hotel door in the middle of a Northeast blackout in 1965, bearing guitars and 'excellent weed'; a passing mention of future Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the drug buddies who 'revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin' in the late 1970s; a young Harvey Weinstein, then a regional concert promoter, passing out Afro wigs to the band and crew during a raucous tour closer in Buffalo."
Here's the book: "THE ROLLING STONES: The Biography," by Bob Spitz (commission earned). I might buy it. It wouldn't be the first book about The Rolling Stones for me. I read Keith Richards' autobiography. Somehow all I remember is him as a little kid keeping a mouse in his pocket. Blogged here.
But anyway, downloading the Kindle of the Spitz book just so I can do a word search on "mohair" is exactly the kind of thing I would do.
"... nor was his explicit approach of studying man as a mere ape a novel one. What ensured the popularity of The Naked Ape was first its clarity of prose, and second, the era in which it was published, where a popularised 'back to nature' philosophy and sexual liberation were all the rage.... [T]he salacious manner of the book helped to guarantee it success. During copulation, he wrote, 'the female breasts … shows a significant increase in size. By the time orgasm has been reached, the breast of the average female will have increased by anything up to 25 per cent of its normal dimensions. It becomes firmer, more rounded and more protuberant.' Elsewhere, Morris would tell readers that the human penis is the largest of all primates, and the only one without a bone, making it harder to achieve an erection.... The Naked Woman (2004) was a similar blend of zoological observation and detailed titillation, with an analysis of women’s backs ('even at rest … naturally more arched than a man’s back'), legs ('part of the sexual fascination … is that they focus attention on the point where they meet'), buttocks (they 'transmit a powerful gender signal') and breasts (which 'operate first as visual stimuli and then as tactile ones'). Never short of ideas, Morris also advanced the theory that female breasts had developed as imitation buttocks 'to shift the interest of the male to the front.'..."
The book reviewer, Alexandra Jacobs, adds: "Maybe, contra Dunham’s mentor Nora Ephron, not everything is copy? Or at least … everything needs a copy editor? The Keebler elf makes a second, sexualized appearance; 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' is invoked twice; and Jack and Lena share soup from a 'terrine.'"
Points if you know the difference between a terrine and a tureen.
Lindy West gives us a striking example of working very hard to get publicity for a new book and barely selling anything. Is this a specific example of female readers repelled by the author's finding a way to stand by her polyamorous husband or something much more general in book publishing these days:
The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:
Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.
I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.
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