An original limerick for your weekend.

In meetings at Kensington Cross 
For lingo I searched at a loss. 
One word—marinara 
Was all I could bear, uh, 
For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.

No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.

Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).

Sherlock Holmes: Getting the great detective into print was a challenge for Conan Doyle in that he hoped to publish one of the better markets. Historian Lucy Worsley, who has a new BBC series on the author’s relationship with his detective, says the first stories were rejected thrice.

The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.

After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.

Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)

Enraptured: February 12, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue. World Radio had a segment on it earlier this month, discussing the piece and how it’s been altered in many recording.

Dante’s Inferno: “Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.

“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)

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