Welcome to the weekend,
Here are five things I thought worth sharing this week.
Given this is Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., why not read President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation making Thanksgiving as a U.S. federal holiday?
Italo Calvino on the distraction that is a newspaper.
This surprised me; the story of how the Library of America series nearly didn’t happen. Today, works from Melville, Emerson, or Henry James are widely available in various unabridged editions. It’s amazing to me that most of the great American works of literature were not available in clean print editions (without footnotes and weighed down by additional commentary) until 1978, when a determined editor was finally able to successfully campaign for a grant to print such editions. It’s also interesting that making these works available was considered at the time, purely a ‘scholarly’ interest, rather than something of interest to the general public.
I thought this short interview with Werner Herzog on ‘truth’, translation, and his advice to “read, read, read” was a bit odd, but that’s what makes it interesting.
Rob Walker: “Your best weird stuff is the weird stuff you already own.”
Currently reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.
Photo by Cary Bates on Unsplash
