Here's a quick read on literature's non-human animals, over at The Millions. And here's Annie Dillard's incredible essay on the very non-human weasel.
“There's a lot of face in our culture today,” writes Masha Tupitsyn over at Berfrois, and I'm inclined to agree. Her take on the face behind Judy Garland's singing voice is equally thoughtful and chilling, all the more so for how Garland's legacy continues to go on, in all its tragic twofacedness.
Having frequently imagined familial bonds with people I've never even met, I find myself taken with this tender little essay on the writer's needful love for a Joan Didion of her very own, but I wonder if these kinds of exploration, these written acts of literary idolatry, are ever to our collective betterment? Or does it just result, like it did for Geoff Dyer, in paying through the nose for dusty old scraps of our idol's paperwork, trying forever to realize our imagined intimacies?
A cartoon really is like a very very short short story.
