Best of On the Web: Number 2

Here’s a selection of the latest and greatest items I’ve encountered while foraging about in the world wide web:

• from The Onion: Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended

• Sadly, the graveyard where Shelley and Keats rest is in disrepair and may have to close.

• Litlove finished reading Philp Roth’s The Human Stain last week, and now I feel a strong desire to read it myself — what a review!

• more thought-provoking reviews from the blogosphere: Bookstorm reconsiders his initial reaction to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

• Harper’s recently digitized it’s entire collection — 157 years worth. Here’s an interview with Paul Ford, the man who spearheaded the project.

• Lionel Trilling on the little magazine: “They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have . . . except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.” Here’s a list featuring ten of the best.

• This June we celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of modernity’s greatest novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ilan Stavans considers its influence and legacy in the Chronicle:

In my 40s, I’ve returned to García Márquez’s masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It’s a “total” novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours. One Hundred Years of Solitude has done something astonishing: It has survived, accumulating disparate, at times conflicting, rereadings. Isn’t that what a classic is, a mirror in which readers see what they are looking for?

• Scott at Acephalous had a hell of a week. As the dust settled, he ripped off two fantastic posts: A Post Every High School Graduate Should Be Able To Understand* and African-American Studies Scholar Responds. Even the OED was out to get him.

• Maud Newton pulls a James Dobson text of the shelf of Mr. Maud’s grandparent’s bookshelf.

• Upper Fort Stewart rubs a little more salt in the wounds of Thomas F. Monteleone.

• And finally: I’ve always wanted to visit Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest. But from the sound of it I may not have the outdoor skills necessary to find the damn thing. It sure looks worth the effort, though: