December 2008
54 posts
2008: a year in books | The Guardian →
This year had all the ingredients for a good novel: fake memoirs, a firebombing, a Booker winner who wasn’t and JK Rowling up in court. Michelle Pauli charts the year in books
Wish I had time to read them all.
You don’t spend much time in a place like...
Harold Pinter - R.I.P →
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE, Nobel Laureate (10 October 1930 - 24 December 2008), was a world-renowned English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, political activist, and president of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a constituent college of the University of London.
Rosie Thomas: A Very Quiet Christmas : NPR Music →
Her new album is a serious record called A Very Rosie Christmas….Thomas is originally from Michigan, as is her sometime collaborator, Sufjan Stevens, who’s released many holiday songs of his own. Both singers are generally lighthearted, but when it comes to Christmas, their music is often thoughtful — even reverent…just right for those who might wish the holidays were a little...
Twenties and Tens: The Best of 2008
Ten noteworthy books of 2008
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell All The Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik 2666 by Roberto Bolaño When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father by Augusten Burroughs When You Are Engulfed In Flames...
Stars - “In Our Bedroom After The War”...
Protesters at the New School Defy Orders to Leave... →
Protests at the New School turned chaotic today, The New York Times reported on its City Room blog, and student demonstrators claimed in updates on a pair of Web sites to have occupied at least two university buildings. The protesters, who had barricaded themselves in a dining hall on Wednesday night, threatened to remain on the campus for a second night, despite being told to vacate the buildings...
Identity Politics - The New York Times →
Why Jonah Goldberg decided to keep his Santa hat on during this “debate,” I have no idea, but it certainly added a bit of levity.
Sarkozy declares war on elitism and offers return... →
Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday went further than any modern French leader in denouncing the race and class discrimination that has poisoned France and made a mockery of the republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
But the president’s plans to get a more ethnically diverse section of people from disadvantaged estates into France’s notoriously elitist top graduate schools,...
Roberto Bolaño's Ascent - ChronicleReview.com →
Roberto Bolaño was a renegade artist, always suspicious of success. Toothless, a heavy smoker with an atrocious diet and no sleeping habits to speak of, he died in 2003, at the age of 50. This brilliant, rambunctious, hard-boiled literary nomad was born in Chile, moved to Mexico in his teens, and went back to Chile in 1973 to support the socialist regime of president Salvador Allende. Arrested...
'I am alive ... I am beautiful ... what else is... →
The publication this month of the first volume of Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a significant event in the literary world. The book gives us more fully than ever the mind and sensibility of one of the 20th century’s finest writers at work during her formative years.
[…]
Although Sontag...
How Sam Became The Man | The Observer →
At 24, Sam Mendes directed Judi Dench in the West End, then his movie debut won five Oscars - cementing his reputation as a unique creative force. Now, with his latest film, Revolutionary Road, winning Golden Globe nominations, and an ambitious theatre project in train, he speaks about family, ambition, cricket - and watching his wife, Kate Winslet, have screen sex with Leonardo DiCaprio.
McSweeney's: Curious Men. →
Whenever a mysterious oddity arrived in Victorian London, readers knew there was one man they could rely on to be at the scene: Frank Buckland. Rescued after a century of obscurity, and culled from thousands of pages of Buckland’s eyewitness accounts, Curious Men is the latest volume in Paul Collins’s Collins Library series. The following is an excerpt from the book, which brings back...
Bush sneaks through host of laws to undermine... →
After spending eight years at the helm of one of the most ideologically driven administrations in American history, George W. Bush is ending his presidency in characteristically aggressive fashion, with a swath of controversial measures designed to reward supporters and enrage opponents.
By the time he vacates the White House, he will have issued a record number of so-called ‘midnight...
Rag (for William S. Burroughs)
by Matmos
on The...
“With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took...”
– Essay - Consider the Philosopher - After the Death of David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com
Is Bill Murray NYC's New Party Boy? | The New York... →
Then and Now - Oscar Wilde in TLS →
Review from June 7, 1963
New book by Thomas Wright reviewed here.
via Maud, et al.
Susan Orlean, David Remnick, Ethan Hawke, and... →
Dorothy Parker: Idol
Why Twitter Turned Down Facebook NYTimes.com →
More from Mike: On Malcolm
I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers on a plane. I love the guy, and I bought wholesale everything in his last two books. Unfortunately, I know a little too much about the Beatles. The simple thesis of the book is: success is based on environmental factors, i.e., luck. One of his examples is that the Beatles’ success is predicated on their having played 8 hours a night, five nights a...
