paper trail

Apr 12, 2013 @ 12:39:00 am

David Graeber

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2013 Guggenheim fellowships, who include Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner, J.C. Hallman, Michael Lesy, Jennifer Homans, Ben Marcus, and Carlin Romano.

To commemorate James Joyce, the Central Bank of Ireland has minted 10,000 special ten euro coins with the author’s face and a quote from Ulysses printed on them. A nice idea, but too bad they misquoted the book.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter traces the literature of American anxiety back to its late 19th-century origins.

We’re a little jealous of the New York Times Magazine softball team’s jersey, which was designed by illustrator Christoph Niemann.

When his novels failed to pay the bills, James Salter spent a stretch of the '70s writing celebrity profiles for People magazine. Says Slate: “Between 1974 and 1976, Salter profiled Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, the Chinese writer Han Suyin, General Sidney Berry, and socialite and author Lady Antonia Fraser.” To the New York literati, it might have seemed like he was slumming it, but People did send him to Geneva to meet Nabokov, and it certainly beat his previous job: selling swimming pools.

David Graeber, author of Debt and the forthcoming book The Democracy Project, talks with Gawker about Occupy Wall Street and the state of politics in the U.S.: “One thing that really shocked me is the complete stupidity of something called the liberal classes in America. It's bizarre that they don't seem to have any political common sense, because the right wing has political common sense. Republicans understand you can sell out your radicals on all the policy but not on the existential issues.”