I watched the trailer for The Great Gatsby yesterday, like I guess everyone of a certain stripe did, and what struck me most about it was that when you finally see Gatsby, I didn’t see Gatsby, I just saw Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a weird letdown. The rest of the trailer is like this tiny beautiful pounding world but every second he’s on the screen—and this is all happening in less than two minutes or whatever, of course—I am just ripped right out of it. I didn’t even know I had feelings about this casting choice until now. So I was thinking about this, and thinking about who I might have liked to see as Gatsby more than DiCaprio, and that’s when I realized that even when I read the book (in high school, and not ever since), I had in my mind a picture of what all the characters looked like, but even when the image in my mind didn’t match up with the casting of the role (for some reason I always imagined Tom Buchanan to be much older, rounder, and redder than Joel Edgarton—not sure why), it was less jarring than seeing an actual person, any actual person, physically embodying Gatsby. Because overall I never formed a picture of him in my mind. He was just a generally man-shaped blob, a shadow with a smudged-out face. I was never able to get a grip on him. Which I guess is maybe the whole thing. Although if I had to pick how he would be rendered on the big screen I guess it would be via Kate Beaton illustration. He could interact with all the live characters like the weird penguin dance scene in Mary Poppins! But with more gin.

View high resolution

Somehow I’d forgotten that Sendak illustrated Little Bear, which might have been my first favorite book (and also, I think, the first book to make me cry? Or want to cry? I want to cry just thinking about it). It eventually became an atrocious animated series on Nick, Jr., so if you’ve only ever witnessed that, find a copy of Else Homelund Minarik’s original and weep at your desk with me today. (Minarik’s still hanging in there! 92! Bless you, woman!)

From Ounce, Dice, Trice by Alastair Reid (via BrainPickings, h/t magdalina)

Meaghan posted something about this book by Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay, which sounds like something I’d like to read, although if I ever do that it will ultimately probably be because of the cover. It looks so much like this great Evil Dead poster that Mondo did a while ago, which has been sold out for forever, and copies of which, last time I checked, were going for some preposterous amounts of money on eBay. What’s the point of this? I’m not sure. I just like these creepy hands and trees a lot, I guess is all I’m saying.

"As Sedaris told me, the Dusty quote is partly fabricated and the other two are made up. So what? Well, it’s one thing for a humorist to recreate dialogue that captures the general spirit of how a conversation unfolded. It’s another to manufacture lines like a playwright, a technique that lets you sidestep a problem that hobbles nonfiction writers all the time: Often, nothing interesting happens when you report a story. But that’s exactly what Sedaris does. When reality sags, he opens the funny-dialogue nozzle. Sometimes in Naked, these rants aren’t just the glue holding his stories together; they are the story."

The New Republic | This American Lie: A midget guitar teacher, a Macy’s elf, and the truth about David Sedaris (via, h/t @austinkleon)

This is fascinating. I’m under no impression that Mike Daisey’s piece is the first story This American Life has broadcast that has contained major factual inaccuracies or outright fabrications—they’ve done more than 400 episodes; that seems impossible to avoid. It does make sense to me that his would be the first they retracted in this way, given that it was a massively popular episode and that Daisey’s show has factored so heavily into the conversation about Apple and its Chinese factories and labor practices in general. I think the stakes are just higher when you enter into that kind of terrain—and they’re less high when it comes to dealing with depictions of your adolescent music teachers or old summer jobs. Still, a nagging feeling that David Sedaris’ wild, true stories were actually not all that true has kept me from loving his work as much as many people have probably thought I should/would, and I’m glad this New Republic piece has been churned up by the Daisey stuff, because I missed it the first time.

So, right, I’m not shocked at all that many of the most fantastic details of Sedaris’ most beloved pieces aren’t wholly true, or even a little bit true, but this still bugs me so much. Really makes me sick, on kind of a stupid personal level, because it would be pretty great if I could make a career out of writing books full of funny, true stories about my dumb weird life (dreeeammmzz!), but more and more it’s seeming like in order to do that a person has to be able to stretch her own truth much, much further than I’m willing. Whomp!

It’s interesting, too, that Daisey and John D’Agata have been painted, or at least received, as raging egomaniacs, but Sedaris is still very much beloved—I guess this New Republic thing hit just before the Internet As Public-ish Evisceration Forum really congealed (oh, 2007—sweet, sweet 2007). He should be grateful for that, I suppose.

An incomplete list of reasons I, at age 14, knew that my middle school vice principal was full of shit when he said that stuff about writers being old guys with white hair and elbow patches

(RE: this)

• Louisa May Alcott
• Perhaps more specifically, Jo March
• Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Lois Lowry
• Ann M. Martin (had not yet become familiar with “ghostwriters”)
• Gertrude Chandler Warner (ditto the above)
• Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Carol Ryrie Brink
• Jane Yolen
• All these ladies
• Madeline L’Engle
• Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
• Patricia C. Wrede
• S.E. Hinton

Reading! It’s important and useful.

You know how on the back cover of every Berenstain Bears book there was a grid of thumbnail images of other titles in the series? Every time the cover of this book appeared in the grid, my parents had to put a square of duct tape over it because I was TERRIFIED of it. Like could not even look at the little one-inch by one-inch square rendering of it. And it appeared a lot because we had about a million of the books, which I loved entirely, except for that one. RIP, Berenstains.

(I almost just said “HANG IN THERE, RICHARD SCARRY!” but apparently he passed away in 1994. And apparently his granddaughters are hottie socialites. WHAT DO PEOPLE DO ALL DAY?)

"I got a super angry hate mail the other day. According to this lady, she and her friend flew from Miami to Atlanta to eat at the restaurant, and when they got here, she found out it wasn’t real. If you can afford to buy a plane ticket on a lark, for a joke restaurant, you could probably afford to lose that money."

MTV Hive | Bon Rappetite Brings Hip-Hop Hilarity to the Kitchen

"By fifteen, I was composing orchestral scores which went unperformed for the most part, and justifiably so. They were difficult, unlistenable, and wildly pretentious, though, thankfully, I didn’t learn the word “pretentious” until I was eighteen, thereby freeing me up to be unbearably guilt-free for most of my adolescence."

Sarah Vowell, speaker to/of my soul

Having just finished this book, I will now spend the rest of my Saturday trying to reconcile how something so painful and beautiful and important could also include one of the goofiest similes I have ever encountered in a celebrated literary work: “She and I’d been orbiting each other like nervous rabbits.”