Oliver Sackbut

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - Oliver Sacks - Books - Review - New York Times

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

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Censorship by theft

Kids' Sex Ed Book Under Fire in Maine - 9/21/2007 7:44:00 AM - Publishers Weekly

JoAn Karkos of Lewiston was so offended and “horrified” by the children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health by Robie Harris, illus. by Michael Emberley (Candlewick, 1993) that she took matters into her own hands, aiming to keep the books away from children. She checked out the copies from local public libraries and is now refusing to return them.

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The Dirty Old Dog of the Baskervilles

Adultery, my dear Watson | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle betrayed his dying wife for a younger woman. Now his letters have finally been made available after more than seven decades, his biographer Andrew Lycett pieces together the affair

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Nonno Nouve

The Literary Life: First at Ninety: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

Millard Kaufman, a début novelist whose book “Bowl of Cherries” comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney’s, as quite possibly “the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation.” This is high praise, and would be higher still were it not for the fact that there are few, if any, epic-comedic writers extant from Kaufman’s generation. Kaufman, who turned ninety in March, is seventy-six years older than the hero of “Cherries,” who, through a number of compelling, if implausible, twists of fate, winds up in prison in the fictional southern Iraqi town of Coproliabad, so named for its specialization in turning human excrement into a kind of cheap, durable concrete.

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Alan Bennett on Royal reading

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett | The digested read | Guardian Unlimited Books

Sir Kevin was not at all happy. "Her Majesty is letting her standards slip. She would rather read than open a hospital."

The prime minister shook his head. "It's very worrying; reading is not an inclusive activity. She even asked me if I had read Hardy. Seakins will have to go."

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Louis Menand on biography

Interesting New Yorker article on the prying prurience of biography, even in this age when people spend half their day putting their private lives online for one and all. Extract:

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one
realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the
duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies
are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically
forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened
later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is
renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what
happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the
reader’s.

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Women and fiction

The title "Women and Fiction" might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write, or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback: I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer - to hand you, after an hour's discourse, a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions; women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Part of a great lecture (given in two slightly different forms on two separate occasions, it says here) by Virginia Woolf in 1928. Reprinted, I know not why (other than perhaps Why Not?) here.