Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull.

… The drama of doubt —The University Bookman: Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist.

… More than always at their best: In Praise of Mediocrity.

 To perpetuate a traditional practice enriches the storehouse of being while also stitching together the eternal society of the dead, living, and those still unborn in such a way that past, present, and future remain habitable places, where human voice can still hear and answer human voice.  It keeps words, habits, and techniques in common, it cultivates, tempers, and preserves a climate of opinion, whatever the other storms of history.

… Diagnostics: Psychos and Psychopaths of the Silver Screen.

… FAN FRICTION: “Sherlock” and its audiences.

The new season reunites Holmes with his primal fan: that love addict Dr. John Watson, played by Martin Freeman. Watson has been grieving Sherlock’s suicide for two years, but he’s now dating a nurse, Mary (played by Freeman’s partner, Amanda Abbington, for added intertextuality), and he’s bought an engagement ring. When Sherlock shows up, the men’s intimacy reignites, and the game is on.

… The talented Ms. Oates: Joyce Carol Oates interview: portrait of a literary powerhouse.

Her parents were “very nice people, lovely people” but “they didn’t have any great ambition for me”. She believes this lack of parental pressure was liberating. She sees the children of Princeton academics wilting under their parents’ expectations. “The children of professors feel, I think, in most cases that they have to emulate [their parents]. You can’t go work on a farm or whatever. Whereas I come from a different era, a different world, where no one expected anybody even to get a high-school diploma.”

… Master of harmonics: His Blues to Be Somebody: Charlie Parker’s Early Years.

… Giddins and Scott DeVeaux write that, in his intensive study, Parker discovered that “any note, no matter how dissonant, could be made to resolve in a chord.” This realization opened unexplored avenues for soloists and led to a new, higher degree of complexity in the art form. While many older musicians rebelled against Parker’s use of dissonant harmonies and complex chromatics, those who did embrace it, and him, discovered that, in DeVeaux’s words, Parker “had the knack of making the most radical innovations seem instantly understandable, masking both the bristling complexity of the musical language and the disciplined intellect behind it.”

… Literary nationalism and part-time love fest: Writers attack 'overrated' Anglo-American literature at Jaipur festival.

"I love your work, Jonathan," [award-winning author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo] told [Jonathan] Franzen, "but in a way you are smeared by English American literature … I think certain American literature is overrated, massively overrated, and I really hate to read them," she said.

Then don't.