This week: literary contretemps, old X-Files episodes, and a particularly lovely art project.
- I don’t have any particular allegiance in the strange friendship/rivalry between authors Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, which has persisted—and perhaps festered—even after Wallace’s 2008 suicide. (I think Franzen is a smug, glib, often astonishingly unempathetic writer, and I’ve never read Wallace’s Infinite Jest, just a few of his essays.) But even without a dog in the fight, I find Michelle Dean’s examination of Franzen’s latest inflammatory statements about Wallace to be fascinating and insightful.
- I happily second Slate’s recommendation that Breaking Bad fans check out some of the episodes that Breaking creator Vince Gilligan wrote for The X-Files back when he was a writer-producer there. In addition to “Drive,” “Pusher,” and “Bad Blood,” which Slate mentions, “Paper Hearts” and “Tithonus” are evocative and eloquent, and though I have some misgivings about “Small Potatoes,” it does feature a very funny, self-deprecating turn from David Duchovny.
- Linda Holmes’s essay on the destruction of books as a cost-saving measure by overstocked, underfunded libraries thoughtfully balances cool rationality and sentiment.
- What a treat to stumble across this Architizer post—with photos!—about a Dutch artist’s recreation of Reims Cathedral with poplar trees standing in for the stone pillars! The beautiful ground level shots, in particular, make me want to visit De Groene Kathedraal.
Much Review About Nothing 