Since this past summer, the London Review of Books has been serially publishing Jenny Diski’s memoirs.London Review of BooksIn this installment, Diski describes listening, as a teenager, to Doris Lessing (Diski's guardian) and her friends: “To start with, I couldn’t understand how it was so easy for them to have a point of view, to know how and why things ‘worked’. ‘Working’, the pivotal valuation, was never defined. There seemed to be too much to learn. I picked up quickly that having opinions wasn’t enough and that it was necessary to have a basis – from reading, from study, from hard conscious thought – from which the opinions were formed. But more important than all the theory, behind and beyond it, there was some ineffable taste or intuitive understanding implicitly agreed on by these talking, always talking, people. I couldn’t imagine ever acquiring the all-important taste. Did you have it or not, from birth? Could you acquire it with diligent study? Many people were dismissed as stupid, especially academics, who apparently lacked good judgment, yet who seemed at least as learned as Doris and her friends. How could they be stupid?”
Patton Oswalt wants to invite Heather Havrilesky, Neal Gaiman, and Cintra Wilson to dinner.
Twitter is putting ads into the lists of who we follow, making it look like you’re following Mastercard when you’re not. The ads are marked as promoted, but their location is exceedingly misleading. Blocking the account will prevent the ad from showing up, but another brand inevitably shows up to take its place.
The science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock, whose seventieth novel will be released in January, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday this month. Moorcock “shook the fantasy and science-fiction establishment and made it possible for writers to step outside the long shadow of Tolkien and other fantasy devices,” says the New Yorker.
Most people who work in bookbinding are fifty-five or older.
Over the years, countless fans have rewritten the end of “Brokeback Mountain” to do away with the tragedy. "The implication is that because they’re men they understand much better than I how these people would have behaved,” Annie Proulx says. “And maybe they do. But that’s not the story I wrote. Those are not their characters. The characters belong to me by law." Proulx finds it so maddening, she says, that she wishes she’d never written the story.
