Three delightful things

David Mamet's quick and dirty writing tips, via a memo he sent to the writers of the show "The Unit." Mamet himself has broken most of these, but they're still entertaining. Love that he clearly knows he's writing in all caps yet he seems UNABLE TO STOP.

Maybe it's a little too cutesy that Brooklyn's new poet laureate supposedly read "The Waste Land" to her unborn son. But I immediately thought of Betty Smith's A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, in which the poor Irish mother decides to read her kids a page from the Bible and a page from Shakespeare every night. If you like plucky heroines, turn-of-the-century historical fiction or tales of surviving through economic distress, it's a must-read -- I've probably done so at least 20 times.

Finally, this isn't new, but how am I not going to post a video of a folk band jammed into a bookstore playing? The band is called Mumford & Sons, the store is unknown: