1. A memoir-essay about the writer’s obsessive worrying about things she feared she might do.
2. Unicorns: Invented by mistranslation.
3. There are lots of terrible lecture classes. But when lecturing is done well, it can work very well.
4. Clownfish change sex from male to female. This would give “Finding Nemo” a very different vibe.
5. Why people read long fiction, by Salon’s Laura Miller:
Part of the allure is simple gluttony: If you’re loving a book, it’s delightful to know that there’s plenty of it. But I believe there’s also an inherent appeal in fat novels, something that only written fiction can offer and that short stories, for all their felicities, aren’t able to provide. You can be swallowed up by a long novel, immersed in the world its author has created in a fashion that no other medium can rival. No, not even boxed sets of HBO series consumed in day-long binges! This immersion reminds many of us of our first, luxuriant plunges into books as children, and any author who can take us back to the place where we forget where we are and how much time has passed will pretty much have us eating out of her hand for good.
The pleasure readers find in this experience is often disdained by literary critics because it tends to hijack your ability to regard and evaluate the book as a work of art. You don’t want to think about the person who created it or what techniques he’s using or how this particular novel fits into a larger cultural or historical tradition. What you want is for your critical distance to fall by the wayside and for the author’s imagined reality to supplant your own. This is what some people refer to as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” even though the coiner of that phrase, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meant it to apply only to well-told stories with elements of the fantastic, things that could never really happen. …
Much of the special appeal of a good long novel is rooted in the imaginative dynamics of reading fiction — assuming, that is, that you’re reading for the particular form of pleasure I’m celebrating here. The moment a reader turns to the first page of any novel, an intricate dance begins. “Do I believe this?” might be the first thing the reader asks. “Do I care?” is surely, then, the second. A character and a conflict are the most reliable way to lure the reader further into the story, but a setting, if skillfully evoked, can do the job, too: David Copperfield’s cold stepfather, Jane Eyre’s stifled pride, the glittering ballrooms of Tolstoy’s Russia, the threat posed to Middle-earth. Gradually, the words on the page stop being words on the page and seem to enter our minds as wholly formed sights and sounds and feelings.
It takes a while to become so invested, and it often doesn’t happen at all. Getting there is work, like pulling a sled up a hill, but when (and if) you crest the top, it’s a splendid ride from there. The problem with a short story is that even if the author does manage to seduce you into believing in her fictional mirage, it’s over almost as soon as you take a seat on the sled. A long novel promises an extended tour, and the ratio of ramp-up to glide is much lower. Of course, most novels can’t get you to the crest of the hill in the first place; you climb and climb and it never stops feeling like work, until you finally turn around and trudge home. Plenty of long novels have this problem, and when they fail, there is nothing worse. Few readings have been as torturous as my own personal slog through Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” for example.
I can appreciate the sense of getting absorbed, but it’s not an experience I tend to seek these days. More here about the “longer is better” idea of fiction.
7. Theory of why a writer might choose to be anonymous.
MonkeyMoonMachine 