“How are we to start this story? I wish I could say that we’ll start at the beginning. But I don’t know where it starts. Just like everyone else, I’m not truly aware of the real sequence of cause and effect in my life….We store up all sorts of stories with fabricated logic, so that life can look as though it has some meaning. So I may as well start here in the midst of the confusion, at a time and a place where fate seemed to be taking a short break, holding its breath.”
“You know what your problem is, kid? Too much Internet and not enough legwork. A Crime reporter is made in the street. How many times have you hidden behind a tree to watch something…Called a witness to a crime or a victim’s relation posing as Chief Inspector Bloggins?…Get out in the street, learn to assimilate: you have to be the thief, the murderer, the victim, the accomplice, whatever it takes to be inside their heads.”—Jaime Brena, veteran reporter, to “the Crime boy,” new recruit.
Celebrating a life | About Last Night.
Terry Teachout’s wife Hilary, his beloved “Mrs. T,” died tonight at the age of forty-nine. In his biography of H.L. Mencken, The Skeptic (2002), Terry quotes a passage Mencken wrote in 1936 for inclusion in a collection of stories written by his wife Sara. She had died a year earlier at the age of thirty-seven. Mencken writes:
“I find it hard, even so soon after her death, to recall her as ill. It is much easier to remember her on those days when things were going well with her, and she was full of projects, and busy with her friends and the house, and merry with her easy laughter.”
Boots & Cats: A World Champ Explains the 13 Levels of Beatboxing Complexity
COVID As Social Disease
COVID is a social disease, a pathological experiment on the nature of our social relations. It is experienced in our social life in four major ways, and our responses bear upon the nature of our society. There are the everyday forms of our social life; the divisions within society that shape our experiences and concerns; the attitudes toward social boundaries — who belongs and who does not; and the social forms available for reacting to threats. – Los Angeles Review of Books
When Magazines Had Visions Of Changing (And Improving) The World
In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’smagazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraking articles of the Gilded Age—began to plot an array of ventures, including a model town called McClure’s Ideal Settlement. – Lapham’s Quarterly
Know What Else Coronavirus Has Infected? Our Everyday Language
Karen Russell: “Today, we are witnessing the shotgun weddings of words into some strange unions, neologisms sped into existence by this virus (‘quarantunes,’ ‘quarantini’), epidemiological vocabulary hitched together by Twitter hashtags. It seems like there is a parallel language contagion occurring. ‘Self-isolation,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘abundance of caution’ — pairs of words I’d never seen together in a sentence back in January have become ubiquitous.” –The New Yorker
How Are Bookstores Surviving, If They Are At All?
Here’s what’s going on with some bookstores in Los Angeles. The Ripped Bodice in Culver City, which has a big Twitter following, offered a “care package” deal. Co-owner Leah Koch: “‘Those have been so popular. We put them up before we closed to foot traffic. Within 48 hours, we had 230 orders,’ Koch says, adding that the store now has a waitlist for the care package service and, as of this writing, there were 700 people on the waitlist.” Other bookstores? It’s not great news. – The Hollywood Reporter
"You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone," says Jill Lepore, "but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear Loneliness
“On Wednesday, I got fired from the publishing house. I went home and sat in a daze, until somebody rang the bell and I opened the door to two dapperly dressed men with kissers like carved wood. They just flashed their IDs and said to come with them…One of the spooks slipped in behind me and kept an eye on my fingers as I dropped my wallet into my handbag…The dapper dans stuffed me into the back of a car…and we sped off to headquarters of State Security.” –Helena Novakova
When Life Gives You Lemons On Capri
The Cut: “It’s all very upsetting. Just, all of it. With wave after wave of acutely unsettling coronavirus information assaulting your eyeballs every time you look at a screen — which I bet you’re doing more often than usual, given that self-isolation is limiting in terms of available activities — it is good, I think, to occasionally feed our brains small and pleasant distractions. Just a little something to take the edge off. You know, like five full minutes of polar-bear cubs discovering dirt. That kind of thing. Many people won’t actually be able to go anywhere for the foreseeable, but, as all this inside time is constantly reminding me, so, so much can be accomplished via webcam — including watching zoos. Luckily, lots of zoos have kept their livestreams on even as they close their doors to the public. Meaning you can now shelter in place with some sea otters. How soothing…”
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Novelists pick books to inspire, uplift, and offer escape - The Guardian – “From Hilary Mantel to Kazuo Ishiguro and Marlon James to Sebastian Barry, writers share their favourite literary comforts..”
Novelists pick books to inspire, uplift, and offer escape - The Guardian – “From Hilary Mantel to Kazuo Ishiguro and Marlon James to Sebastian Barry, writers share their favourite literary comforts..”