June 2009
5 posts
Talk of the Town
Following on from a serious, but interesting, article on what’s happening in Iran were two pieces in the New Yorker this week that were interesting, a little quirky, and made me smile.
The first is a look at what kinds of music soldiers listen to. Unsurprisingly, Metal seems to feature prominently - the research was spurred-on by claims that a ridiculously high proportion of fan-mail sent...
NYBooks in the Guardian
Yesterday’s Review section of the Guardian, that I just got round to reading, had three articles from the New York Review of Books that made for interesting reading:
Malise Ruthven writes on a Divided Iran, picking out the ways, both now and in the past, in how men and women are considered and treated.
Michael Dirda writes about Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley...
Infinite Summer →
An effort to get people reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer (starts Sunday, carries on into September, doing around 75 pages per week).
I’m a little bit tempted to join in, but it would mean buying another book when I have quite a large pile (literally, I don’t have a bookcase in my new flat yet) sitting unread. The idea of reading-along like this intrigues...
Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer
So, for the record: I am not the Zodiac killer, had absolutely nothing to do with those (or any other) murders. As far as I know, I wasn’t even in California when any of them happened. Similarly, I had nothing to do with the death of Joan Webster, a Boston college student whose murder Penn has also tried to pin on me. A note to Zodiac hobbyists and Penn aficionados: Please don’t bother parsing the...