The latest actor to go vampire? John. C Reilly! As you might expect, he’s a hammy vampire, not a sparkly one. See the preview for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. (The film is based on a series of children’s books by English-born Irish author Darren O’Shaughnessy, who publishes under the name Darren Shan.)
Cirque Du Freak
RIP Harry Crews
Dwight Garner, Maud Newton, and Jason Diamond are among the many to mourn the passing of Harry Crews this past week. “Few writers,” Garner writes of Crews, “could touch his authority and muscle.”
Feeling Very Still
Can you hear me, Major Tom? The world lost one of the good ones today in David Bowie; celebrate his enormous contributions to art as we know it and take a look at this list of Bowie’s 100 essential books which includes everyone from Camille Paglia to Anthony Burgess. Bonus: here’s a link to Bowie singing “Changes” in what became his final live performance.
Dabbling in Cliché
“As you can see here, it’s all about desire and longing.” Yes it is, Ragnar, yes it is. Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson is fascinated by what he calls “the oppressiveness of western culture claustrophobia.” His newest work, Bonjour, has shifted focus to poke fun at the ways in which the rest of the world elevates French sensibilities.
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Words of Wonder
Over at Aeon, Jenny Davidson explores what makes a great sentence. As she puts it, “A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on sentence structure for creative writers.
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Shop Talk
There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.
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Return of the Literary Magazine
“If the novel is struggling in this new environment, what of literary magazines? Long extinct? The opposite: literary magazines are getting popular again.” Guardian documents the resurgence of the literary magazine, thanks to the internet.
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Talking to Ourselves
“Like walkie-talkies that require a button be pressed to speak and released to hear, does reading require that either the voice of the author or the voice of the reader’s consciousness be silenced at any given moment? Such an analogy suggests that reading is an act of hospitality toward another’s mind, in which we silence our voice in courtesy to the voice of another’s consciousness, a voice that alternates with our own in conversation.” John Biguenet on silent reading.