Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 166

Huh?

Yesterday's post has disappeared. Wordpress is showing it as "scheduled" instead of "published"—scheduled for yesterday. I can access the post via its permalink but it won't show up on the main page. What's up with that?

Books about the Middle Ages

Earlier this week, Phoebe asked me to recommend books about the middle ages. Jane and I went around the house pulling things off shelves. The timing was perfect, because I've been on a bit of a middle ages jag myself, ever since reading The Perilous Gard (so good! read it!!) which though set in Tudor times, at the cusp of Elizabeth's reign, is a retelling of the medieval Tam Lin ballad. I've listened to perhaps a dozen different renditions of Tam Lin over the past few weeks; this one by...

An Interview with Ellen Weiss

I am pretty excited about today's post. When I got my first job in children's publishing, working as the editorial assistant to Stephanie Spinner at Random House, one of the best parts of the job was getting to meet and talk to and learn from Real Writers. And by far my favorite of the many wonderful writers I met in that context was an author named Ellen Weiss, who had a staggering number of books to her credit. Her writing was hilarious—I think The Poof Point was the first one of...

Back in business

Bonny Glen was down all morning due to server problems. Happy to say all is well again and I have something very fun on deck for tomorrow (barring more server hijinks). See you then!

Back in Business

Bonny Glen was down all morning due to server problems. Happy to say all is well again and I have something very fun on deck for tomorrow (barring more server hijinks). See you then!

Three bookstores

…is how many we visited (2) or telephoned (1) this morning on my quest for the May issue of The Believer SO I CAN FINISH THE RASSAFRASSIN NICK HORNBY COLUMN.

#1 only had the March/April (no Hornby).

#2, fresh out.

#3, again with the March/April issue! Aren't we practically in June already, in magazine-publishing terms?

Signed,

Impatient

In Which I Am Probably Seriously Maligning Henry James

I'm realizing I view Henry James with a degree of suspicion: I have a nagging sense that he looks down on all his characters, despises them a little. He seems to work so hard to make them nuanced and complex and human, but always there's this faint whiff of condescension—as if, once he's made them brought them to life, he finds them somewhat repulsive because of the very flaws he has worked so hard to convey.

I don't know, maybe I'm misreading him. This is all coming out of nowhere, really...

This Just In

Via Omnivoracious:

Nick Hornby resurrects his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column in The Believer (subscription only): "I have decided to vent my spleen by embarking on a series of books that, I hope, will be of no interest whatsoever to the readership of this magazine." [via The Second Pass]

Looks like The Believer has just earned itself another subscriber. I. Am. So. Excited. To hear this news. I got hooked (via a Mental Multivitamin post) on Hornby's column about his eclectic reading life n...

Saturday Snapshot

Delicious Links for May 15, 2010

• Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows | Video on TED.com—Hat tip to Mental Multivitamin

• "If Socrates Had E-Mail…"—About Kenyon—Kenyon College

Augustine's brilliant emphasis on language as a means of passage between our interior selves and the external world, a bandwidth for the expression of desires, introduces a theme which resurfaces again and again, almost uncannily, in the consideration of communication or information technologies. What is striking is not the truism that media of...