Closing tabs

Hot weather is not conducive to thought or activity! I did make the necessary additional pass through my style manuscript to reduce the length of selected block quotes - my editor gave me a very intelligent list of page numbers, nicely distinguishing between long passages that truly couldn't be cut and ones that would not suffer excessively from trimming or cutting....

Miscellaneous light reading: I read and loved Steve Hamilton's latest Alex McKnight novel, Let It Burn; its description of present-day Detroit is so amazing, it sent me back to a book I only dipped into when it first came out, Mark Binelli's Detroit City is the Place To Be, and also to the next-to-last book in the McKnight series, which I must have missed at the time, Misery Bay. Also, the second installment in Ben Winters' Last Policeman series, Countdown City

Closing tabs:

Martin Amis interviewed at the Telegraph.

My colleague Edward Mendelson on priestly language and the cathedral of Apple.

Digitization of the Board of Longitude archive.

Olga Khazan on drinking in Antarctica.

Closing tabs

Edward St. Aubyn interviewed at the Times (via):

In the English education system, the last two years before university are spent intensively studying a small number of “set books.” Few people — even as slow a reader as I am — are likely to spend longer in the company of a book than an A-level student. The works I studied over those two years were Racine’s “Phèdre” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” for French A-level. “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James; Joyce’s “Ulysses”; poetry by Yeats and T. S. Eliot; and “King Lear” were my set books for English. James’s idea of a “center of consciousness” presiding over a scene, Flaubert’s slogan “le style est tout,” Joyce’s claim that “imagination is memory,” Racine’s austere adhesion to the classical unities and many other aspects of those works became part of the foundations of my sense of taste and, even if I wanted to question them, continued to influence me when I became a writer myself.

Also: the daily routine of Hunter S. Thompson; the career of a human cannonball (FT site registration required).

A poached egg and a double Jack Daniels

How Athol Fugard came to stop drinking.

UNLESS HE JUSTIFIES HIMSELF

The story of an abusive psychoanalyst. This is an incredible piece - it is like reading a small and wonderful novel! Via Helen DeWitt.

[Addendum: Wynne Godley's obituary, which perhaps relies a bit too heavily on the LRB piece itself. An amazing line, though: "He also introduced roulette as an entertainment after certain college feasts." It seems to me on the basis of this that he never wrote the promised autobiography - but perhaps the LRB essay stands on its own as a more unusual and striking self-portrait than a full-length book could have done. Another good link: Alan Macfarlane interviews Godley in 2008.]