Category: writers

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. The documentary Grey Gardens showcases some of my deep-seated fears (being old and poor, becoming dependent on someone else, turning into a crazy cat lady), so I had some reservations about watching the HBO film about the same characters, but it was very good. I recommend it, if only to better understand how crazy cat ladies get that way.

2. An interview with Cormac McCarthy in the Wall Street Journal reveals that he drinks what I drink, when I want gin (which is often): Bombay Gibson, up. And that he writes the way I do, when I don’t have a deadline:
“I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.”

3. And finally, here’s a map of Holme’s London, with notes about what adventure happened in each mapped point. It’s very thorough.

Author Trivia

Karen

Did you know that Jean-Paul Sartre was a Nobel Prize winner, and he refused it? And that the Swedish Academy said, essentially, “Well, you’re still a Nobel Prize winner, even if you don’t accept the award.” Fun times in 1964. (Today’s post courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac. You can read more about why Sartre refused the award here.)

[Whenever I think of Sartre, I always think of “The Jean Paul Sartre Cookbook,” a satire that someone posted in the early days of the internet and my friends and I found in high school. Oh, we thought that was the cleverest thing. Satire! Sartre! Beginning French class! Good times.]

Happy Birthday Jack London

Karen

The Writer’s Almanac tells me that today is Jack London’s birthday, so I got some more details from Wikipedia: Born in 1876, he worked in a cannery, sailed as a pirate and as part of the California Fish Patrol, went to the Klondike with goldrush fever, got scurvy, bought a ranch and a yacht, amassed a library of 15,000 volumes, and died in 1914 of a morphine overdose.

I didn’t realize that he died so young–I guess children’s copies of The Call of the Wild don’t get into a lot of detail about death from alcoholism and accidental overdoses.