Links for March 13th
What artists have been up to this year, the British press, private schools, Damian Lillard, Philip Roth
Hope you had a smooth one and enjoyed the spring weather, brief though it may have been.
This week, these are some bangin’ links.
Links
The Times asked a bunch of musicians, artists, and writers the same handful of questions about what they consumed and created the last year, and it’s a delight to read. (Like Karen Russell and Trent Reznor, I too enjoy mindless YouTube/Instagram reviews and tutorials.)
Can’t go wrong with a Caitlin Flanagan piece on private schools!
This Q&A interview dives into the complicated, cyclical dynamic between the British royal family and the British press.
Bradley Beal, on the (often terrible) Wizards, is one of the best scorers in the NBA — and is friends with Damian Lillard, and their friendship is based in not wanting to be the guys who go to LA and New York, or some super team. This Athletic story on their friendship is good (and not in that overly schmaltzy, they’re-the-Good-ones way).
If you’re into Philip Roth or how authors position themselves in the present, this review of a new biography is worth checking out. It also features this taxonomy of American writers:
In the old gallery there were patrician men of letters (Howells, Eliot), abolitionists (Stowe), adventurers (Melville, London, Hemingway), madmen (Poe), shamans (Whitman), aristocrat expatriates (James), bohemian expatriates (Stein, Baldwin, Bishop), playboy expatriates (Fitzgerald), denizens of café society (Wharton), romantic provincials (Cather, Thomas Wolfe), small-town chroniclers (Anderson), country squires (Faulkner), suburban squires (Cheever, Updike), vagabonds (Algren), cranks (Pound), drunks (West, Agee, Berryman), dandies (Capote, Tom Wolfe), decadents (Barnes), butterfly-chasing foreigners (Nabokov), cracked aristocrats (Lowell), recluses of uncertain eccentricity (Salinger, Pynchon, DeLillo), committed radicals (Steinbeck, Rexroth, Wright, Hammett, Hellman, Paley), disabused radicals (Ellison, Mary McCarthy), radicals turned celebrities (Mailer, Sontag), activist women of letters (Morrison), alienated children of immigrants (Bellow), neo-cowboys (Cormac McCarthy), hipsters (Kerouac), junkies (Burroughs), and hippies (Ginsberg). In the end there is only the careerist, the professional writer who is first, last, and only a professional writer. The original and so far ultimate careerist in American literature was Philip Roth.
Tag yourself, as they say. I don’t know that I would classify every single one these people as such, but it’s a lot of fun to think over. Anyway, that review has a compelling case with some tooth about Roth.
If you haven’t seen it, my colleagues did this great oral history of March 11, 2020 (the Tom Hanks, NBA day) — which I know not everyone wants to revisit that day, but I didn’t feel like I was revisiting this, because it contains so much information about people whose days were so different from my own. The Broadway section is particularly sharp.
Lastly, this is from a little while back, but this short piece on some bad advice Tina Fey wrote a while back, and how to reconcile artists you both find compelling but also have some problems with, I found worthwhile.
Light book commentary
None at the moment, but stay tuned for Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.