Morning Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Three days before the end: January 31 1959: Buddy Holly, et. al., play at the Duluth Armory - Zenith City Online.



… UPDIKE by Adam Begley | Kirkus.



Sculptor David Tothero, who did The General, remembers having Updike's father as a substitute teacher one day in Adamstown.



… Correcting history, as it were: Daphnes book prize launched to right literary wrongs of past.

We're not doing a feminist corrective, or a corrective based on any sort of identity politics," Crispin told US publisher Melville House's blogMobyLives. "I'm just tired of having the same conversations about 20th-century literature, which always seems to revolve around these same writers: Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Roth. When you challenge this reduction, when you say maybe there were other books, other stories, other things going on, people get angry … Maybe Updike really did write the best book of the year! But I doubt it. Hopscotch is a marvel, Muriel Spark is still 10 years ahead of us."

… Career extension: REVERED WRITER BECOMES MERCHANT.

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons is [Lawrence] Block’s 11th novel featuring the signature exploits of his urbane gentleman thief. However, unlike virtually every one of his prior literary efforts involving a cavalcade of indelible characters, including, of course, complicated private investigator Matthew Scudder, Block’s latest is completely self-published.

… Podcast — Mark Vernon and Rupert Sheldrake discuss The Hidden God of Atheism.

… The greatest Victorian: All the Sad Sages.

The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is an oddity, for Bagehot left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait out of the boxfuls of essays, letters and articles he did leave. These have been republished in multi-volume editions three times, by Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John Stevas between 1965 and 1986. Prochaska chose to present Bagehot in the first person ‘because I thought Bagehot could speak more vividly of his life and mind than I could as an intermediary in a conventional biography’.