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Shalom Auslander didn't review Mailer's The Castle. He really, really wanted to. He just couldn't bring himself to read it. I know what he means.
Language warning: He drops a few "F-bombs," if that sort of expression irks you.
Firing Squad has an interesting take on DRM. Warning: the site has super-annoying "content links that are just as annoying as "malicious viruses and rootkits."
Huckleberry reminds me that I don't have the big ears in this household. Plus, his swivel.
It reads like the plot of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel: 145 Roman soldiers survive the death of their general, Marcus Crassus, and, as mercenaries, fight their way across the ancient world, winding up in China.
Sometimes, DNA is stranger than fiction.
Via John Marks.
You either loved Molly Ivins—well, I should probably just stop there. If you loved the written word and valued wit as much as spleen, you just did love Molly. I'll miss her.
Not surprisingly, most of her obituaries didn't do the lady justice. Of course, Ivins' brilliance and wit were remarkable, but what I really loved about her was the clarity of her written voice. It was pitch-perfect. People called her style conversational, which it was, but it was an ideal of what conversation should be: personal, amused, and unafraid of calling a spade a shovel.
Nancy Friedman, who does have…
At On an Overgrown Path, blogger Pliable ruminates on the Order of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and the glorious music the order has inspired.
There's Poulenc's searing, glorious opera, of course, but did you know the sisters commissioned a piece by Handel?
Me neither, but that's because the work was either never produced (unlikely, given Handel's ability to rip 'em out to order) or hasn't survived. Andrew Parrott to the rescue, with a "hypothetical reconstruction," performed by the Taverner Consort and Players. Pliable—who sounds like one of us, based on his praise for balance engineer Mike…
Sean O'Hagan makes some mix tapes and laments the lost art of the sleeve note.
"The iPod," Hagan says, "is the single most iconic emblem of our brave new world of music consumption, a pure and wonderful object that makes more music of all kinds more easily available to more people than at any time in history. ... It may be late in the day, then, to consider what is being lost in this heady moment of what postmodernists call accelerated culture. Has, for instance, the huge shift in the way we consume music altered the way we hear music? Has it changed the nature of our emotional engagement…