Daggoo and Flask were the original #TrueDetectiveSeason2

This August, as we prepare to unleash a truly remarkable fall catalog, MobyLives will be taking a bit of a breather. We’ll still post the occasional news item or feature, but for most of this month we’ll be posting a roundup like this every morning. We will, of course, remain active on Twitter and Facebook. We hope you have a great August, and that you’ll keep checking in with us!

• The 2014 Hugo Award winners include Ann Leckie, Charles Stross, and Tor, which was omnipresent.  (Hugo Awards)
• Order BELT Magazine’s Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. It’s fantastic. Also, something makes me think that you’ll be hearing more about Cleveland starting this fall. (BELT)
• With the film adaptation of The Giver opening over last weekend, Lois Lowry spoke with NPR‘s Neda Ulaby, revealing that her inspiration for writing her novel–in which the members of a sterile society have their memories erased–came from her father’s memory loss. Lowry says, “He didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but he began to lose pieces of his memory, the way people do as they age… And so I began to think about writing a book about people who had found a way to manipulate human memory, so they wouldn’t have to remember anything bad.” (NPR)
• Lindsay Lohan is preparing to pen quite the opus (My Struggle 2?), as she announced last week that her upcoming memoir will probably be a trilogy. Based on her journals, the books will get into Lohan’s family issues and struggle with drugs; she says that “it will probably be like a trilogy, like Harry Potter,” which is not a trilogy. (Irish Independent)
• At The Atlantic, Jen Doll takes a look at the language of menus. She cites a study showing that ““every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.” (The Atlantic)
• Mansplaining douchebags have gone legit, as The Oxford Dictionary added both words to their online edition. Also, neckbeard and sideboob. (The Mary Sue)
• Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn is on Broadway, playing a “gifted but obscure novelist,” in Sex with Strangers, a play Newsweek describes as a “compelling, comic drama about letting go of the past and embracing the future—even if that future is written in pixels instead of on paper.” (2econdStageTheater)

Today’s passage from Moby-Dick: 

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.–Chapter 93

Today’s song: “Ocean Life” by John Cale & Bob Neuwirth