Friday's Literary Grab Bag

Let The Dust Settle

Too many sentences have already been written about Reality TV. So we’ll avoid the topic and instead direct you to Vanity Fair, where James Wolcott eloquently shreds this generation’s favorite form of entertainment. Still, one can’t help wondering how, if most everyone with whom you speak supposedly detests Reality TV, the form exists at all. We call hogwash, everyone watches the damn stuff. More ridiculous news you can’t help but investigate: Eagle-eyed computers posit Hemingway and other famous authors wrote at subpar levels. Elsewhere, Steve Almond venerates Vonnegut in The Rumpus, a new book shares the stories behind everyday inventions, and Kim Stanley talks time travel in his kitchen. In closing, America’s recent literary heartthrob, Roberto Bolaño, gets his reputation scrubbed, and a scribe in Granta lays down the laws for writing about Africa. Turn off the TV, this is reality. — Kevin Murphy

– Reality TV has lowered network property values. On his weekly blog, author James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) noted the significance of a memorial tribute to CBS news giant Walter Cronkite on 60 Minutes being followed by “a childish and stupid ‘reality’ show called ‘Big Brother,’” an Orwell-for-dummies exercise set in a hamster cage for preening narcissists where cameras surveil every calculated move. — James Wolcott in Vanity Fair

– Winston Churchill’s iconic “fight them on the beaches” speech did not make the grade when it was marked by a computer system, exam experts have said. And extracts from modern classics such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding and a novel by Ernest Hemingway also failed to impress the computer. All were marked down by a US program designed to assess students’ essays. — Writing Analysis in the BBC

Almond Misses Kurt

– I devoted most of my senior year in college to a detailed study of his work, writing a thesis titled “Authorial Presence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut,” a copy of which I recently asked my mother to send me, in her capacity as Chief Curator of the Steve Almond Archives, a capacity, I should add, that she views as the necessary burden of having raised an itinerant narcissist. — Steve Almond in the Rumpus

– You might know that the tantalizing combination of peanut butter and jelly you’re eating between two slices of bread was named after a certain Earl of Sandwich, but how many other words that we use every day are named after real people? How about galvanize? Silhouette? Leotard? These words — called eponyms — and many more fill a new book called Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words, written by John Bemelmans Marciano. — Anonyponymous in NPR

– As his publisher Jane Johnson, an author herself, puts the finishing touches to a roast chicken in the kitchen, Kim Stanley Robinson – Stan – tries to explain his new theory of time travel, worked out for his latest novel, Galileo’s Dream. “Time is strangely braided. I see Jane today, when I haven’t seen her since 2004, and we first met in 1991. I can remember that meeting – it seems like just yesterday, but also like several million years ago; it has both elements,” says Robinson, a warm, articulate Californian who, despite his jetlag, peppers his conversation with references to science and scientists, philosophers, historians, novelists – it’s hard to keep up. “So I wanted to talk about that and then the backwards-ness, the third strand. Walter Benjamin talked about it – you go forwards in time but we’re always looking backwards in a rear view mirror. That struck me as interesting.” — Kim Stanley in the Guardian

Roberto Plots His Legacy

– I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover. — Bolaño in Guernica

– Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans. — How To Write About Africa in Granta

Video: Visiting Africa