Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… A God That Grounds All Things, Ctd —  The Dish.

I think it's a waste of time trying to engage with someone like Coyne, who is just another true believer (just not in God).  I know quite a few people, by the way, who are not theologians, but have a far more sophisticated understanding of what the term God means than Coyne does. He really should get out more.

… A monument of humanism: Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918, by Paul Cohen-Portheim.

… A good writer remembered.

Almost 45 years after his death, O'Hara has a loyal, but small, following, which includes the journalist Gay Talese and essayist Fran Leibowitz. His influence is detected as early as Irwin Shaw's '"Girls in their Summer Dresses," a 1930s short tale of smoldering marital strife; mid-century with Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," a legendary Esquire profile, and in the 1990s with Philip Roth's numbing "American Pastoral." And yet O'Hara remains untaught in most English departments. He never received the posthumous idolatry of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. O'Hara's notoriously thin skin spoiled his legacy, but the editor William Maxwell said it best: "Good writers deserve to be remembered."

… Call Me Burroughs: A Life by Barry Miles.

It was in Tangier that Burroughs discovered his talent for transforming into el hombre invisible. This was a projection of anonymity so total it bordered on pseudocide. Miles speculates that invisibility was Burroughs's way to negotiate his "fear of exposure and his horror of being the object of contempt and ridicule" due to his homosexuality. This is a bold claim to make on behalf of one of America's most unapologetically gay writers, but sexuality was never a prerogative for Burroughs—it was, in his opinion, a control agent to which he was preconditioned.

… THE PRISONER OF STRESS.

… anxiety of the kind [Scott Stossel]  is afflicted with is not a riddle. It’s an illness. There is therefore nothing, except in the medical sense, to solve. That’s not what Stossel wants to believe, though. He has an idea that more is at stake. He thinks that there is a metaphysics of anxiety. “To grapple with and understand anxiety,” he says, “is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.”

… Complete interview series —  GOOD TIME CRIME: TALKING WITH ELMORE LEONARD.