
-- Portraits of vanishing languages, via a gorgeous National Geographic gallery that reminds us that one language dies every fourteen days. Above is an image of a Punta Chueca teenager named Deborah Anabel Herrera Moreno, who dropped out of school and is learning to write the Seri language. The word for "writer" in Seri is "caasipl," which translates to "one who makes marks."
--- And then, what happened? Emily Nussbaum has a great piece in The New Yorker about the power of a cliffhanger. While she focuses on television storytelling, there's a long look at literary counterparts in disparate genres.
-- Where Daisy Buchanan lived. (Hint: it's not what you think.)
-- "They’re thinking of a token of recognition—they want to exist, as writers." Tim Parks on money and writing in the New York Review of Books.
-- What happened when W.B. Yeats tilted toward the occult, via the "magic shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly. See also an early Hungarian account of vampires and an essay on the uncomfortable relationship between medicine, magic, and miracle.
-- Used to be, not that long ago, you could compete in the Olympics for medals in literature, sculpture, and music.
-- Scholastic's Weekly Reader, a longtime classroom favorite, hangs it up after 84 years.
-- Not just the facts, but the truth: Linda Greenhouse has a great piece at Nieman Reports that challenges "he said she said" journalism.
-- On the "bilious bravado" of Ambrose Bierce, and anger in journalism.
-- What a poorly-handled story in Ebony can teach journalists about covering sexual assault.
-- “'For her to compare me to Margaret Sanger,' he told me, 'it’s beyond the pale.'” Outstanding nuanced story on what the heck's going on in Texas, and how it ties into women's health madness more broadly.
-- "The Man Segregation Built." From one of the most brilliant young narrative journalists around, here is a can't-look-away story on the "fall and rise of the new black leadership in Jackson" by my pal Ingrid Norton. She also has a short piece that is on fire (in more ways the one) in Detroit.
-- Heart melt! A nine-year-old heard Detroit has money trouble, and opened a lemonade stand to help it out. His flier: "May you please help the City of Detroit. Please buy this popcorn and drinks. It's not so expensive. I didn't make it expensive so you would have to spend all your money. The money will help clean up trash on the ground and cut the grass in the parks." Turns out the kid's getting the attention of the mayor, and the world.
-- "Batman's Gun: Why the comic-book hero was disarmed in 1939."
-- Letters for kids! There are about six bright and bookish kids I want to give this marvelous ongoing literary gift to. (There is also an adult version.)
-- Gore Vidal, a most complicated man of letters, has died. A frequent essayist in the New York Review of Books, you might want to explore his pieces on "the romance of Sinclair Lewis," the life and art of Orson Welles, the comic novels of Dawn Powell (who he almost singlehandedly brought back to the fore), and the sparking mind of Italo Calvino. Chris M. also points us to Vidal's New Yorker essays.
-- "Adventures in Depression." The funniest comic/story hybrid about sadness that I know. Via Mark B.
-- "Dreams about mice bode despair." An old pal of mine translates Marina Eskina in that essential journal, Asymptote.
-- What's that? You haven't read Edith Wharton's erotica lately?
-- "Searching for Sugar Man" is a new film about one of the strangest stories in music history, stretching from Detroit to South Africa. It's getting a ton of high profile press and rave reviews, plus the championing of Chris M., who first alerted me to it.
-- Nadine Gordimer is recovering after breaking a rib (my god, she's 88 years old already!), but she's still speaking her mind. (""Our education system is a wreck. It's a shambles.")
-- Exciting new translations are coming out of Brazil soon.
-- World Literature Today picks out some of the best of migration narratives.
-- A very interesting take on the dreadful straits that the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is spinning in.
-- On liking Stephen King novels, and being a fluid, dynamic reader.
-- Carl Sagan's reading list.
-- This is pretty much why I gave up feeling like I had a duty to finish every book I began, or that seemed "important."
-- I'm a new subscriber to The New Yorker and between Junot Diaz's devastating story ("The Cheater's Guide to Love") and this week's publication of a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that it rejected 75 years ago, it's really working out for me. The magazine also revived its 1926 profile of Fitzgerald: "Very deliberately he has taken as the field for his talent the great story of American wealth." Last link via Chris M.
-- And finally, let us say good night with "The Museum of Endangered Sounds."