Well, that was nerve-wracking! Blogger was down for almost 24 hours, and yesterday's post plus any comments after early Weds. afternoon vanished into the ether! I am relieved that I was able to cut and paste yesterday's chicken post from an old screen shot. In any case, the delay threw me off. Please, Blogger, keep working!
Anyway, crisis averted for the moment, and on to today's links:
DFW Links:
Since his posthumous unfinished novel, The Pale King, came out last month, there's been a lot of new press about David Foster Wallace recently. (For those new to this blog, my own connection to Dave is explained here.) I haven't read the novel yet, but there were two pieces I found especially interesting.
One was this thoughtful essay in The Awl by Maria Bustillos who went through Dave's personal library, now in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and wrote about all the self-help books she found there: "Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library."
The other is a rare interview with Dave's widow, Karen Green. She stays out of the press, mostly, but she spoke to The Guardian around the time of the release of the novel.
A more cheerful literary link:
Although I've only read a few of the essays in Elif Batuman's book The Possessed, I've decided that she's such an entertaining writer that I'd read what she wrote no matter what it was about. I loved this essay in the Guardian. It got attention when it first came out because of the part where she asks Jonathan Franzen whether he has any weed, but that's only a small part of why I liked it: "Life after a bestseller"
From Possessed to Possession:
Since I'm (sort of) on the subject, I found myself at lunch the other day with a bunch of young scholars talking about how much they loved what they discovered in the archives. So, it was to my astonishment that I brought up A.S. Byatt's book Possession only to discover that none of them had read it! It's been more than 20 years since Possession was first published, and my first read of it still remains one of my most satisfying reading experiences ever. Byatt can be hit or miss, but Possession is worth all the praise heaped upon it back when it was published and won the Booker Prize. I've heard mixed things about Byatt's newest, The Children's Book (which I bought in nice compact form in India in January), but I'm still going to give it a try.
The Delicious:
I haven't made too many things from Martha Rose Shulman's "Recipes for Health" in the NY Times, but this week's spring vegetable recipes looked great.
I'm particularly intrigued by the recipe for Asparagus with Green Garlic and the one for Green Garlic, Potato and Leek Soup.
(Other green garlic recipes can be found on this very blog:
Spinach and Green Garlic Soup and Green Garlic and Chive Souffle, both delicious!)
Today's photo is courtesy of a shop in the Greater Kailash N-Block Market in Delhi. I don't think the cat was for sale.
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