paper trail

May 24, 2012 @ 4:31:00 am

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Critic and historian Paul Fussell, author of the the award-winning WWI study The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, the New York Times reports.

The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is online, and we have very mixed feelings about it. But if you’re into the idea of a Leonardo DiCaprio-starring, Kanye West-soundtracked take on Fitzgerald—which is also shot in 3-D—this is probably for you. In other adaptation news, New York reports that James Bobin will direct The Confederacy of Dunces, and that Zach Galifianakis will star as Reilly.

Although Richard Brody disagreed with many of Susan Sontag’s opinions on film—particularly vis-a-vis her opinions on Godard and resistance to interpretation—reading her journals has made him realize what was behind her thoughts on movies, and how central they were to her identity.

The London Review of Books has published “The University Poem,” a previously unseen work by Vladimir Nabokov about his time at Cambridge University. The work will be included in Nabokov’s collected poems, which are coming out in the UK in July.

To promote the re-release of seven of Truman Capote’s novels, Vintage has published a handful of Capote’s more famous works—including Breakfast at Tiffany’s—as e-books, marking the author’s breakthrough into digital print.

Hemingway scholar Michael Reynolds has shed light on who the “lady poets” were in Ernest Hemingway’s snarky short piece, “The Lady Poets With Foot Notes.” The “college nymphomaniac” was identified as Edna St. Vincent Millay; the “favourite of State University male virgins” was Sara Teasdale; and Amy Lowell was apparently “big and fat and no fool.”

Tao Lin is “no longer trying” on Twitter, and HTML Giant is tracking his progress.