FPO: For Print Only features the fun cover for John Durak’s collection of poetry Condiments and Entrails designed by Bunch.
The Oracle of Redirection — James Gleick, author of The Information, reviews four books about Google for the NYRB:
Google defines its mission as “to organize the world’s information,” not to possess it or accumulate it. Then again, a substantial portion of the world’s printed books have now been copied onto the company’s servers, where they share space with millions of hours of video and detailed multilevel imagery of the entire globe, from satellites and from its squadrons of roving street-level cameras. Not to mention the great and growing trove of information Google possesses regarding the interests and behavior of, approximately, everyone.
Glittering Delights — Simon Schama talks to The Guardian about his recent book of essays Scribble, Scribble, Scribble:
I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can’t write about though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
And finally…
Power, Corruption and Lies — New Yorker critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and Listen To This, on Oscar Wilde, homosexuality, and a new “uncensored” edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by Harvard University Press:
[N]o work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men… At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.