Square Pegs

When one leads a rich and full fantasy life, it is inevitable that you imagine yourself in all sorts of dire situations. Or rather you imagine you, the character, in those dire situations. You wonder what would happen if you suddenly became very ill, getting lost in the grand detail, the feeling, the scent of antiseptic. We can imagine just about anything, have imagined just abouto anything — except blindness. That, to us, is the no-go zone. We cannot imagine life without reading. We cannot imagine life without writing, yet we don’t seem to panic over the loss of our […]

Kitty Burns Florey (Solos) has scared us. Now, don’t get us wrong, we can obsess over just about anything. We adore structure and logic (please, snickering in the back row is rude). We are the type to look down on a maze and see the path clearly. We get misplaced, but we don’t get lost. But, dammit, we never did get diagramming sentences. We were too busy racing forward writing them to ever want to go back and dissect them, except to take out entire swaths of words and replace them with more words. Diagramming the poor things? Would you

It’s like you’re handed cheesecake the day you start South Beach. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna…and yet you’re still believing you can lose weight. Sure, an offer of sugar and cream cheese and crushed graham crackers (actually, we have no clue) after four weeks of no carbs can destroy the most dedicated of dieters, but on that first day? No. You still believe you can be the svelte person of your imagination (we would suggest eating the cheesecake remains the best option, but suspect it might weaken our argument, such as it is). The news* has been rife with

Maud Newton takes a look at the (purported) death of fiction, and all of our favorite suspects are in the room. Was it Ms. Reviewer in the Book Section? Professor Editor with the style guide? Major Marketing and Admiral Acquisition working together? Is it possible that all of supposed best friends of books are quietly poisoning them with publishing arsenic? Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that novels are suffering at the hands of the professionals. Same for music and movies. Probably computer games, too, but we don’t follow that particular industry. Once art becomes a commercial enterprise, there tends

Imagine our surprise when we woke up this morning to discover that not only had we not posted about this New York Times Magazine article — we hadn’t even finished reading it before we fell asleep. Somehow, Emmylou Harris’s words about a record label being “piracy-proof” resonated in our dreams. The story of Nonesuch, a little label (backed by a corporate giant, which we’ll get to in a moment) that could, shows that art is valued in a world run by marketing and the inevitable projections: if it sells this many units, we’ll make x profit. If it sells this

We cannot say why this story amuses us, but there you have it. The problem with history is that it keeps changing. Totally, totally ruins reality, what with nobody ever knowing for sure what the real story is. We so prefer fiction — at least you know the ending’s not going to change. Right. Probably should caveat that as well. Okay. At least you know the ending’s not going to change unless the author goes all artiste on us and rewrites the damn thing. We are going to stop thinking about this subject as, like quantum physics, it’s giving us

In our previous life, we kept a secret file. Every few months, our boss would race into our office and ask to borrow “the file”. We’d hand it over, slip the pencil she’d accidentally stolen off our desk from her hand, and follow her as she carried our special collection of articles back to her office. Experience had taught us that letting the file out of our sight was dangerous. No, we weren’t spying on our peers. Much, much sadder than that: we collected articles on anti-piracy. Yes, you read it right. While others pored over Daily Variety and The

We could paraphrase and pull out favorite thoughts, but sometimes it’s better to just let you read for yourselves. A Sense of Vocation

We know you’re not counting on us to remind you about Banned Books Week — which is good because somehow it’s Thursday and we just took our first glance at a calendar this week (which is not to say we haven’t seen calendars on the preceding days…we just happened to spend our hours poking and prodding at calendar theory). If you’re a reader of any note, you already celebrate this week in the style to which you’ve grown accustomed. Probably, if you’re like us, by doing something like reading while eating. We mostly don’t understand the concept of banning books

It’s rather embarrassing to admit, but we had no idea that Rona Jaffe wrote a novel. Our exposure to her was through celebrity profiles. It’s always cool to learn something new about someone you have put into a slot. Suddenly, they don’t fit and you get to change all sorts of things around in your mind. Learning that Jaffe gives back to her community is also cool — authors don’t get the patronage they deserve (we are advocating for a system where up-and-coming artists are kept, in a manner of speaking, freeing them to do the art thing without worries