Enjoy Your Cigarette — Tom Cox reviews Penguin’s Underground Lines boxed set for The Guardian:
Underground Lines often matches its writers to its tracks very well, in terms of temperament as well as personal history. The Jubilee line, so often associated with capitalism and the Docklands development, is a good match for John O’Farrell, a writer whose wit was marinated in the political 1980s. The nervy prose of William Leith could not be more apt for the rather fraught Northern line, and his manic, anxious account of being evacuated from a train that was filling with smoke is probably the most addictively readable thing here. “People never tell you to have a pleasant journey on the underground, just as people will say, ‘Enjoy your meal,’ but never ‘Enjoy your cigarette,'” he writes.
Dirty Lit — Edward Jay Epstein at the NYRB Blog on being taught literature by Nabokov:
He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor’s note.
He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.
Exploded Hearts — Melville House’s Christopher King on his cover design for How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher, at Talking Covers:
In the end, I did what I usually do, which is to steal an idea for the cover directly from the manuscript. In this case, the narrator’s son—who, again, is a car—has a heart in place of an engine, so I printed off an image I found online and showed it to our publishers:
“It’ll be like this exploded diagram of a car, but with a heart in place of the engine.”
“OK!”
And finally…
The Wall Street Journal looks at ‘The Improbable Rise of NPR Music‘ which, for all of the WSJ’s obvious churlishness, manages to be fascinating despite itself:
NPR Music’s breadth, depth and ability to break new material are its main strengths. The site offers music that appeals to rock, jazz and classical lovers—all under one roof. Still another advantage is NPR Music’s ties to “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” which, even if Washington-centric, have music woven into their fabric and provide news for the site as well as a familiar storytelling style.
NPR Music in its present form just turned five. “It’s the closest thing we have to a pure startup inside what is now a 40-plus-year-old institution,” says Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s executive vice president and chief content officer. “This group of now roughly 20 people has had an opportunity to invent something from scratch.”
(via Largehearted Boy)
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