Like the Rake, until we got the email, we had no idea the Ruminator existed. But there’s some good stuff, including an interview with Volker Schlondorff, a piece from Jhumpa Lahiri, and more. We’ll definitely be checking this vibrant Minnesota bimonthly out in the future.
Month / March 2005
Upton Sinclair, Soon to Appear in a Spring Break Video
The San Francisco Bay Guardian takes a long look at Professor Lauren Coodley‘s almost single-handed Upton Sinclair boosterism. She’s prepared a new anthology, The Land of Orange Grove and Jails, of Sinclair’s writings for Heyday Books. What’s interesting is that Coodley discovered Sinclair almost completely by accident, while substituting for a political science class. And apparently, the Huntington Museum turned down a collection of Sinclair’s papers.
If It Isn’t Art, It’s Memorex
Ian McEwan has said that “life imitates art.” In the last year alone, McEwan reports that he witnessed a balloon accident and was stalked by a mentally ill man, published a tawdry photo in a newspaper, lived with the consequences of playing a prank as a child, and began sleeping with his siblings when both of his parents died. McEwan hopes that he can fix things so that “art can imitate life,” because this might make his novels more interesting, in light of the mixed reviews for Saturday.
[RELATED: How Critics Got Saturday Wrong]
Just Be Grateful They Didn’t Refer To Them As “Ingenuous Cripples”
New York Times Corrections: “Because of editing errors, an article and a review in The Arts on Saturday about the film “Murderball,” which looks at rugby players who use wheelchairs, referred to them incorrectly. They are quadriplegics, whose injuries or illnesses affect all four limbs and the trunk. (Paraplegics are affected in their legs and trunks.)”
Equal Opportunity Mocking
We won’t comment on the blogger wars. We already defended the right to mock literary figures a few weeks ago and have nothing further to say. We plan to earn our black sheep stripes the right way (at least for today, largely because we’re feeling exceptionally immature), by moving onto mocking non-literary figures in the most tasteless manner possible, beginning with the Governator himself (as pictured below):
