Charles Bock (Beautiful Children), in a recent interview, sounding perturbed: “Where are you right now? I’m in a writer’s room in Manhattan. There’s all these other people with their fucking computers doing their stupid little bullshit. It feels pointless. You wanna feel like it matters. It’s hard to do that when you’re in a room like this. At least it’s quiet.”
Charles Bock Interviewed
Nabokov’s Retranslation
"It has been said of the Beatles that there is not a clunker of a song in their oeuvre because they simply never let the bad stuff get released. The same might be said of Nabokov—for 'Camera Obscura' shows that he was indeed capable of writing a second-rate novel. (He knew it, and rewrote it.)" John Colapinto looks at Nabokov's retranslation of Laughter in the Dark for The New Yorker.
Himself
Recommended Reading: Richard Kreitner on the legacy of Walt Whitman.
●
●
Zeitgeist-y
"We get the book adaptations we deserve... We need to re-tell these stories over and over because each generation sees them in a different way, needs different things from them. We tell these stories again and again, their survival over time proof of their intrinsic value. People are writing new Zeitgeist-y things all the time of course, but we return to classics because the stories have endured for a reason." Sky Friedlander on the "Literary Period Piece."
●
●
Yes, Professor Orwell?
It’s a student’s worst nightmare: after plowing through a paper you should have completed that morning, you decide to skip the reading you’re supposed to have done the next day. At which point your textbook tells on you.
●
●
“I am thankful for death”
It’s fun to imagine what literary titans might have thought had they witnessed modern pop culture. In that vein, here is a monologue, delivered by T.S. Eliot, on seeing the play Cats for the first time.
●
●
52 Blue
Recommended reading: Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (which we covered here and here), writes again, this time about 52 Blue, "the loneliest whale in the world." The full work is available at Atavist for $3.99, but an excerpt is available at Slate.
●
●
Natasha Trethewey Reading
You can listen to U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey read her poem “Enlightenment” for the Virginia Festival of the Book.
●
●