(Untitled)- July 4, 2008 Did Robert Graves steal from his mistress, Laura Riding Jackson Mark Jacobs says yes: "Between 1926 and 1939, he was learning from her what she was doing and thinking," Dr Jacobs said. "He was taking her ideas, her research, he was simply shovelling it in to his own books.... She left her manuscript in Majorca. She later wrote to him Graves and told him to burn the manuscript. We now know that he didn't. It all appeared in dribble form in The White Goddess. He used it for his own ends without...http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013104 (Untitled)- July 3, 2008 Poet and Bookslut contributor Daniel Nester looks at parodeities": rock songs with lyrics altered to make them Christian. A perfect example of rock parody-as-study guide is Learn Some Deuteronomy, perhaps my favorite ApologetiX song. The tune is Def Leppards 1987 hit Pour Some Sugar On Me, said to be the greatest strip club song of all time. Heres ApologetiXs chorus: Take your BibleShake it off Everybodybreaks the law Learn some Deuteronomycan you name those laws Learn from Deuteronomycmon...http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013097 (Untitled)- July 3, 2008 The London Review Bookshop -- where if I could, I would live -- has just turned five years old. Andrew Stilwell gives the secret of their survival, and it involves cake.http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013096 (Untitled)- July 3, 2008 Neil Gaiman talks to Terry Pratchett. I asked about the Alzheimer's. 'If I look at the table to see if my mobile is there, the chances are I won't see it even if it is actually there. But if I know it is there, I will see it. Sometimes the brain will overrule the eye and say that something isn't there, even though it is. And because that something could be the little girl in the pink dress on the zebra crossing, I don't drive a car any more.'http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013095 (Untitled)- July 3, 2008 A federal judge threw out a new Indiana law requiring bookstores and other retailers to register with the state and pay a $250 fee if they want to sell sexually explicit material.http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013094 (Untitled)- July 3, 2008 In my latest column for the Smart Set, I wrote about how teenage girls use the word "slut" as a weapon against one another, and how moralizing about sex is unproductive. The timing was coincidental. As a cautionary tale about promiscuity, the book is a total failure. Easy is the slutty equivalent of Reefer Madness: Instead of marijuana that leads to murder, prostitution, and death, sex leads to disease, pregnancy, and social isolation. Jessica learns the error of her ways before the end of...http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013093 (Untitled)- July 2, 2008 Books Un-CoveredWhile die-cut hardcovers can be pretty great, the problem with die-cut paperbacks is that they are always getting torn. My local used bookstore always has one such book -- usually V.C. Andrews, with a ghoulish woman staring out of a die-cut keyhole -- that’s been Scotch-taped together by some diligent employee. My dad just bought me the paperback reprint of The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (he seems to think I love horses, when in fact I am terribly afraid of them),..http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013092 (Untitled)- July 2, 2008 Here are two things I would be reading today, if I weren't about to run off to spend the day reading William James. It's for an assignment, I swear. Tom Wolfe in conversation with Michael Gazzaniga (Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique) about free will and neuroscience. Jenny Diski's essay on South Africa for London Review of Books. The you cant understand until youve lived there argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me...http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013091 (Untitled)- July 2, 2008 They're billing as a Netflix for magazines, which makes me think that I'll get a copy of Esquire after some 14-year-old girl has sharpied hearts around Johnny Depp's head. I'm a little disappointed to learn that's not how it works.http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013090 (Untitled)- July 2, 2008 Hilary Mantel writes about the time she dreamt a story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4am and typed it on to the screen. The story was called "Nadine at Forty". In its subject matter, in its tone, its setting, it bore no relation to anything I have ever written before or since. It extended itself easily into paragraphs, requiring little correction and not really admitting any; how could my waking self revise what my sleeping..http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_07.php#013089 |