“Sometimes I sleep,” Alcuin wrote to Charlemagne shortly before his imperial coronation. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “it’s not for days.” Plagued by visitors to the shrine of St. Martin, the abbot of Tours wrote wistfully about the transience of earthly pilgrimage. “The people I meet,” he noted, “always go their separate ways.”
Alcuin was a busy man, as am I this week—but not so busy that I can’t offer you these neat literary links.
Cynthia Haven has the latest Robert Conquest poem fresh from the poet’s own hand.
Ferule and Fescue reviews the movie Agora and wonders why it’s hard to dramatize the “life of the mind” on film.
John Scalzi tells would-be writers: “Find the time or don’t.”
The folks at Open Letters Monthly review all ten books on the New York Times bestseller list. They also ask: “Does Gone with the Wind hold up as a book?”
Four thousand emails? Big-timey YA fantasy novelist Maggie Stiefvater describes a day in the life of an author.
Adam Golaski (the poet behind the terrific, quirky translation “Green”) peruses a new anthology, Werewolves and Shapeshifters.
Here’s something you don’t see every day, unless you have John Keats below your stairs: a call for ekphrastic poetry.
Learn how a ghazal works by reading one: John Hollander’s “Ghazal on Ghazals.”
Jake Seliger sees good advice for writers in Tony Bourdain’s thoughts on becoming a chef.
Classical Bookworm digs into the world of French dictionary publishers.
Bill Peschel remembers Jean Shepherd (of A Christmas Story fame) and his greatest literary hoax.
PeteLit winds down his “summer of classics.”
Julie K. Rose has posted two new short stories, one of them intriguingly titled “Treatise on the Efficient Cause of the Ebb and Flow.”
Bibliophile Bullpen (the post is from 2007, but it’s new to me) visits a bookstore I remember fondly, and with a bit of heartache: the incredible Old Number Six Book Depot in Henniker, New Hampshire.
Finally, on a dignified note: a video of Alfalfa from “The Little Rascals” singing Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”
Quid Plura? 