Update on Comments Glitch
The cause of the problem has been traced to Jetpack. Jetpack support has informed me that “this is an issue that our development team is aware of and working to resolve. It will likely be fixed in the next version of Jetpack in early January.” So that’s where we are.
In the meantime, here’s a trick that has been working for me: If you type a comment and hit the “post comment” button, you’ll get the message “submitting comment,” followed by nothing. But, if you manually reload the page, the comment will magically appear.
To reload the page manually, look for this symbol, which usually appears either just to the right of or just to the left of the URL (web page address) field near the top of your browser:
Again, I apologize for this inconvenience. I do value your comments and look forward to restored unhampered communication.
The Craft of Surrealism: On Accessing the Unconscious in Our Fiction
For me, the most fascinating aspect of reading good fiction is the process through which the writer and the reader together can tap into the unconscious realms where knowledge that is outside of our rational and logical abilities exists. Here Anita Felicelli discusses how the process works: “The irrational and disjointed and dreamy take up more room in our inner geographies than the part of consciousness that squarely meets logic or any external systems. The vastness of the unconscious, largely unremarked upon in a modern, mechanized, corporate-heavy society, allows for a million different valences when deployed artistically.”
‘Perfect for winter nights’: the best crime novels to read at Christmas according to Ian Rankin, Bella Mackie and more
Tis the season! Ian Rankin, Bella Mackie, Val McDermid, Sarah Perry, Sophie Hannah, and more offer their reading suggestions.
People who are good at reading have different brains
Mikael Roll, professor of phonetics at Lund University, asks, “What kind of brain structure do good readers actually have?” Here he discusses his research results recently published in the journal Neuroimage.
From his results he states that “it’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritised. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cosy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal – it’s a service to humanity.”
The One Hundred Pages Strategy
“On how to read one hundred pages every day.”
Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, declares, “every day, come rain or shine, on religious and secular holidays, when I travel and when I am exceptionally busy, I read at least one hundred printed pages.” This piece about how and why he does this, he explains, is aimed at the “enormous numbers of Americans [who] say they wish they read more than they do, if only they could figure out how.”
Murderbot, She Wrote
“Martha Wells created one of the most iconic characters in 21st-century science fiction: Murderbot, reluctant savior of humanity. Then she faced an existential threat of her own.”
I knew almost nothing about Murderbot, and absolutely nothing about its creator, Martha Wells, when I came across this profile by Meghan Herbst, a senior research editor and contributing writer for WIRED. For anyone else who isn’t familiar with Murderbot:
Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”
Read about Wells’s life and how Murderbot made her, in her older years, an overnight sensation when she’d been writing fantasy and science fiction for almost 30 years.
‘These are magic books’: bringing imaginary works of literature to life
“A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist, from Byron’s destroyed memoirs to Shakespeare’s lost play”
Adrian Horton describes an exhibit of books that don’t exist at the Grolier Club in New York City. Horton calls it “the most extensive and tangible collection of the imaginary – by definition, the rarest of books – to date.” If you’re interested, the exhibit will be on display until February 15, 2025.
That Healing Sound
“When music is medicine.”
Kevin Berger, editor at large of the science publication Nautilus, talks with Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician. Levitin is the author of a recent book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, which, Berger says, “puts the spotlight on burgeoning methods of music therapy restoring pleasure to so many people who have lost it.”
Seriality and Slow Grief
“Lauren Eriks Cline looks back at 20 years of the TV series ‘Lost’ and the lessons it holds for us today.”
I did not watch Lost when it was broadcast (2004-2010), but once I discovered it I obsessively binged all of it. This article examines how the writers employed time and its possibilities to create “a series about the impossibility and inevitability of “‘going back.’”
Like Lost itself, the piece is mind-boggling.
On Henry James and the Enduring Lessons of Love
I’ve always thought that the major works of Henry James shouldn’t be introduced to literature students until graduate school—not because his complex writing style can be daunting, but because a lot of life experience is necessary for understanding his depictions of the many nuances of human emotions. Katherine J. Chen apparently understands this same truth about James’s works, as she describes in this short piece about “what it means to read and to understand love in James and, by extension, in life.”
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
