Ellen Ullman on early, humanities-based programmers
“I’ve always written. I’m from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities.” — Ellen Ullman
Pronoun trouble, with Elizabeth Bishop
“I remember her art as a talisman against disintegration.” Caleb Crain on pronoun trouble and Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings.
New, and old, Harry Crews
“’I don’t know when I’m going to stop,’ he said. ‘I guess when I die.’” Harry Crews is working on a novel, all his old books may be released electronically, and Georgia Review has a new memoir excerpt.
Underminer poet husband
Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to his sister about Sylvia Plath’s “good fortune” in selling “a long rather bad poem” to The Atlantic, “one of the Mags in America.” (To be fair, Hughes generally admired Plath...
Where have the Catholic writers gone?
I recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the end of the Latin Mass — and Catholic “drama of salvation” novels — even though I strongly disagree that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960...
Library borrowers’ habits a century ago
What Middletown Read tracks borrowing records of Muncie Public Library patrons from 1891 to 1902 and shows how library use is not a lonely act but “part of the complex story of the social nature of reading.”
David Berman blogs, y’all
Exciting: Poet and Silver Jews singer/songwriter/mastermind David Berman has a blog, Menthol Mountains, where he’s pondering “the phony gulp,” hooked-up verse, and other things. (Thanks, 5redpandas.)
On wrong books for traveling, and fated new ones
“There is something charmingly serendipitous about the English books you find in strange countries.”
OWS + Bartleby
Housing Works Bookstore has organized a group reading of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” in support of Occupy Wall Street, 11/10, 3 p.m. Join us if you’re free. 60 Wall St.
All unhappy families alike, too?
“[U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.” — Jeanette Winterson (Thanks, J.)
The couple who morphed into F. Scott and Zelda
Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald “a cutting letter about [Tender is the Night], accusing him of cheating” by fictionalizing Gerald and Sara Murphy. I’m rereading the fascinating 1962 profile of the couple who inspired Fitzge...
The ongoing grievance of feeling forever left out
“Alfred Kazin was eaten alive by his own demons. Some who are being eaten alive withdraw into brooding silence; some cry aloud to the heavens. Kazin was distinctly of the second type.” — Vivian Gornick on Alfred Kazin’s journals...
