With Kanye West in the news for doing something stupid at an awards show, what better time than now to point readers to our “Open Letter to Kanye West.”
In Kanye West News…
Authorship and Entitlement
A white male poet recently revealed his controversial strategy of using an Asian pseudonym to place his poems, which were eventually selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry anthology for 2015. Brian Spears writes for The Rumpus about the complications of diversity in publishing, Affirmative Action, and the ethics of poetry submission systems.
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Go Buy A Watchman
In the spirit of the relentless consumerism and the commodification of literature, five hundred signed, specially-packed copies of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman will be retailing for $1,500 each. Did someone say “consumerism“?
Oral Histories Galore
2011 is the year of television’s oral history. On the heels of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, published last May and reviewed by n+1 here, you can now check out I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. You can whet your appetite with an excerpt here. If television’s not your thing, you can also check out New York Magazine‘s oral history of the Upright Citizens Brigade, and of the founding of Ms. magazine.
“As if they didn’t exist.”
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Brian Warfield’s forthcoming novella Bridges No Longer Span These Waters.
The Old-New Journalism
“The repetitions, the ellipses, the onomatopoeia: All the markers of Wolfe’s stylistic DNA were adaptive mutations to a competitive climate, search-engine optimization for the typewriter age.” Here’s an interview with Tom Wolfe about his new novel, Back to Blood, which is receiving mixed reviews.
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Žižek’s Take on Baltimore
Philosopher and flower hater Slavoj Žižek comes late to the “let’s discuss The Wire‘s greater cultural significance” party, but he does bring some excellent points with him. For the record, he doesn’t believe it’s the greatest TV series of all time. And the entire thing is worth hearing if only for an in-depth analysis of this [NSFW] scene.
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