The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.
The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.
Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.
Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.
When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.
I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.
A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.
When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.
Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.
Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.
Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.
Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.
Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.
Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.
I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.
Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.
A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.
We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.
