Among the brand-name French theorists of the mid-20th century, Roland Barthes was the fun one. (Foucault was the tough one, Derrida was the dreamy one, Lacan was the mysterious one — I like to imagine them sometimes as a black-turtlenecked, clove-smoking boy band called Hors de Texte, with the hit album “Discipline ’n’ Punish.”)
Sam Anderson, opening his NYT Mag riff on Mythologies with quite possibly the greatest lede of all time.

Source: The New York Times

What is the best way to commune with an author, other than reading his books? Stand in his childhood bedroom? Retrace the route he used to walk to work? Write his name, in his house, with his own quill pen, on a postcard of him?

Such behaviors have become staples of literary tourism, a tradition that has been around for at least a couple of centuries. A literary tour is the secular echo of a religious pilgrimage. The hope is the same as with saints’ relics: that some residue of genius will survive in the physical objects an author has touched, that the secret to his mind will turn out to be hidden in the places his body passed through — the proportions of a doorway, the smell of old stone. Literature, for all its power, is an abstract transaction: a reader gives time and attention, an author gives patterns of words that call up vivid people and landscapes that — mystifyingly — are not physically there (at least beyond the level of neurons firing). It seems like a natural human response to try to plug that gap — to look for solid, real-world corollaries for those interior landscapes, whether it’s walking the route of “Ulysses” on Bloomsday, stuffing a bagpipe with haggis on Burns Day or wizard-spotting on Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station. It’s the brain’s attempt to anchor an abstraction, to make the spirit world and the boring world finally align. It is, in my experience, one of the cheapest forms of magic available.
The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut by Sam Anderson

Source: The New York Times

My Favorite Time of Year:

When NYT Magazine’s Sam Anderson wraps up his year in marginalia:

On Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84:

“Has any author made more fictional phones ring?”

On Joan Didion’s “The White Album”:

“People who accuse Didion of being humorless are insane: she’s hilarious, in a v. strange way.”

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My own personal copy of Cesar Aira’s Ghosts is full of the check marks, stars, and occasionally the phrase “Zing!”, most often when he digresses on television.

What are the gems from the margins from of your books?

Source: The New York Times