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May 22, 2006
Shorties
Pitchfork profiles online music discovery tools.
The Observer profiles venerable singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.
Mallory O'Donnell categorizes hardcore vinyl collectors for a Stylus Soulseeking column.
In Slate, Meghan O'Rourke praises short, or "small," novels in light of the recent New York Times list of the best American fiction of the past 25 years.
Big novels may indeed contain more of the flotsam and jetsam of social reality than shorter novels do. But concision, lyrical intensity (not the same thing as "well-crafted prose"), and metaphorical depth are in principle as aesthetically valuable as expository generalization, sweep, and narrative complexity. Taut perfection may not be the only hallmark of a good novel (the novel has always been an expansive form), but it is surely one of them.
What's on Senator Hillary Clinton's iPod?
Songs from Clinton's youth figure heavily in the selection of about 1,000 songs, said Clinton, who called herself "a child of the '60s and '70s." The mix includes Aretha Franklin's "Respect," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "Take it to the Limit" by The Eagles, she said.
The Vinyl Preservation Project streams full albums from out-of-print releases.
The Horn Book offers a summer reading list for children.
Drowned in Sound interviews the Black Heart Procession.
DiS: The Spell seems a lot more, well, menacing than Amore, and it also has a real coherence: a mood is set early and maintained…
Jenkins: Definitely. I think with each record, we try to make them like a journey of sorts, like reading a book or seeing a movie. The last one was a little bit more obvious in that direction, but we really do think about sequencing and artwork, and the whole idea of the record instead of one song or one style. Each is a mixture of flavours, and I think this record did come out a bit darker, and a bit more sinister, with the idea of The Spell. To me it tangles and ties ideas of politics and war, and you can read into in that way, if you think about, or you can look into it as a collection of love songs.
