Another Basket of links

August 25, 2019

Because your life on a Sunday needs more staring at screens.

Nice book review of a novelized telling of the life of Erik Satie.

An interesting interview by Jesmyn Ward with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has written a novel entitled The Water Dancer, which will likely be on my Xmas list. I really like this line from the interview: "Not only can fame be dangerous, Coates believes, but it flattens you. You have all these ideas about who you are, what you do, what you believe. But people don’t see that. They only see what they want to see. And then Coates utters something that strikes me as so insightful and true, something like: This erasure of the authentic self for the famous (reflective, wish-fulfilling, stardust-glazed) self is only good for people who dislike themselves, because it allows them to erase who they are and become someone totally new. In order to be really good at being famous, in order to embrace it wholeheartedly, you have to dislike yourself." 

This dude!  This dude was a printer in London in the first half of the 17th century.  My oldest ancestor that we can trace is Anthony Mathewes, who came from London to the Colonies in 1681.  Could they be related?  I'd so love it to be the case.  I too, could then be a printer and rascal.

A poignant piece by a friend of mine, Elisabeth Becker-Topkara, on moving a year ago to Charlottesville from the Northeast.

Johnny Cash's complete (but very very miniature) set of Shakespeare, now safely ensconced in the archival twilight of the Folger Library in Washington, DC:  

A throwback for you!  Jean-Luc Godard reviews Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.  "People say Hitchcock lets the wires show too often. But because he shows them, they are no longer wires. They are the pillars of a marvelous architectural design made to [work?] without our scrutiny." Who knew Godard would be such a lucid and intelligent film reviewer?  Actually, probably a lot of you did.  But I didn't.  

(Tip: if you want to follow up that Godard review, check out Francois Truffaut's famous book on Hitchcock, simply entitled Hitchcock.  Also there's a movie, a documentary, about the interviews--very much worth seeing.)