Linkety Links

The week's winding down and you've got some time to kill, maybe. Have a bit of linkage.

First off, in regards to the recent post about my 7yo's reading difficulties, the Dyslexie font. Dyslexie is free to download for personal use, so we're going to see if it makes any difference for her.

Today in history: The battle of Yorktown begins. Here's the cast of Hamilton performing The Battle of Yorktown, sans rifles, because remember a million crises ago when a man who swore allegiance to ISIL shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando the day of the Tony Awards. 





Conserving the Blue Boy, the famous Gainsborough painting at the Huntington:

With a master of science degree in art conservation from the University of Delaware, O’Connell is trained in chemistry as well as studio art and art history. In addition to a rigorous educational background, paintings conservators need what she calls “hand skills”: manual dexterity, steadiness, and artistic ability “to intricately reintegrate any damages so that the original brushwork of the artist can be seen and understood.” The Blue Boy’s issues that need fixing are “both structural and visual,” O’Connell says. The original canvas was lined a century or so ago, and the lining is beginning to separate. Paint is lifting and flaking in some areas, though it’s being held down by multiple layers of old varnish; as O’Connell removes yellowing topcoats and trapped dirt, she’ll deal with the deterioration beneath. The painting’s wooden stretcher is visible where the canvas has worn away at the edges; O’Connell hopes to confirm that it is the original, 18th-century support.  

How editing saved a manuscript and made it stronger

I spent the next five months, from mid-January to mid-June of 2016, redoing the whole book, rethinking it from top to bottom. 

I began by taking his letter and his marked-up version of the manuscript with me to Austin, Texas, where my wife and I were taking a break in February from the long Maine winter. (Austin is a great town for live music, food, and hiking—and its winter feels to me like Maine in the summer.) I sat in the backyard and read and reread Scott’s comments. I didn’t argue with them. Rather, I pondered them. If he thinks that, I would ask myself, how can I address the problem? I underlined sections. At one point he pleaded in a note scrawled in the margin, “If you would only defer to the narrative, you could get away with murder.” I liked that comment so much I typed it across the top of the first page of the second draft, so I would see it every morning as I began my day’s work.   

The elements in haiku



If Bostonians loved other institutions like they love their local sports organizations

— Hear that new one from the BSO? 

— Shit, yeah, that Brahms? That one knocked me square on my ass. Even more so than the Shostakovich. Pardon me, the Grammy Award-winning Shostakovich. 

(They toast.) 

— We should repeat. 

— We should but we won’t, because the Recording Academy hates Boston. Watch. Watch them give it to the frigging New York Phil, which is a fine orchestra if you like listening to a bunch of soulless prima donnas collect paychecks. 

(They nod, drink.) 

— Gotta respect Andris Nelsons. 

— The kid can conduct his ass off, in the bravura tradition of Seiji Ozawa. 

— Friend of mine down in Quincy just named his pit bull “Ozawa.”

Famed American author Shirley Jackson, writer and housewife:

The housewife role also provided Jackson with a form of camouflage. Bowing to stereotypes, she preferred to present herself to reporters and critics — virtually all of whom were men — as a women’s-magazine-certified happy homemaker who tossed off her stories during breaks from dusting. “I can’t persuade myself … that writing is honest work,” she said cheerily in an interview with Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review. “Fifty percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to — well, create concrete things again.” The pose sometimes worked too well. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan myopically criticized Jackson as part of “a new breed of women writers” who wrote about themselves as if they were “‘just housewives,’ reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA.”

This is how longform is done: Eccentric Culinary provides us with a deliciously detailed history of chicken and waffles, in two parts.
Part I
Part II