I’m a little late to this one, but Ruby Vassar at the Vroman’s Bookstore Blog ran a pretty funny April Fool’s Day post.
Saving Borders Bookstore
“He’s like a Shakespeare.”
How do you “challenge Muslim stereotypes” in film? Add more white actors. The director of a biopic about 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hopes to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. star in the film.
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#workingonmynovelaboutyournovel
Cory Arcangel‘s Working on My Novel is composed solely of tweets from people who (one is led to assume) are engaged in the singularly tragic enterprise of writing books that, unlike Working on My Novel, will take years to complete, yet won’t be published by Penguin or noticed by The Paris Review. Oh, the meta-irony. And now I’ve just honored it with a Curiosities post.
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John Ashbery Poem Spans Bridge in Minneapolis
There’s a pedestrian bridge spanning Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis that features a John Ashbery poem written on its steel beams. This is a fabulous slideshow of photos showing the poem. Via been thinking.
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Karen Russell’s Note of Hope
Karen Russell spoke to Frances Yackel about love, motherhood, hope, and her new collection, Orange World and Other Stories.
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Not I
John Clare, “the peasant poet,” wrote wide-ranging poems on rural themes, distinguishing himself from his peers in the 19th-century literary scene in England. In 1830, in the midst of an episode of depression, he wrote a long polemic against the first-person pronoun, in the form of a letter to his friend Eliza Emmerson. In The Paris Review Daily, an excerpt of the letter.
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The End of Copyright, The Death of the Novel
Would anyone write novels in a world without copyright? According to Tim Parks, they probably would not. For more on the relationship between the market and the product, see Parks’s essay on whether more money leads to better writing.
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