If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”
The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
Lit Mags, Ahoy!
Three cheers for literary magazines, eh? Do yourself a favor and check out Tin House’s new Portland/Brooklyn issue (with mixtape to match!), DIAGRAM 12.4, Hobart’s revamped website (with daily content!), and the brand new Revolver magazine out in the Twin Cities.
Instapoetry Month
We’re in the thick of National Poetry Month now, and Tweetspeak has a full round-up of ways to participate online. In particular, I think the Virginia Quarterly Review’s “Instapoem” series is especially rad. (Gee, I wonder why.)
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Semicolon Shenanigans
Need to spice up your writing? Try one of McSweeney’s punctuation marks such as the Yellow-Winged Apostrophe, which likes “to ‘peace out’ of its obligation to indicate possession or contraction,” or the Academic Ellipsis, which “is used by those who wish to demonstrate just how much more they know about how to use ellipses than you do.”
Egan On E-Readers
Jonathan Franzen isn’t the only writer opposing technology and digitization. Jennifer Egan, in a panel discussion last week, compared Facebook to a “huge Soviet apartment block.”
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Sarah M. Broom on Unfinished Work
"The unfinished work is no less real, or necessary, or powerful than the book," Broom says in a recent Whiting Foundation speech.
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Keanu Reeves, Poet
for actors who’ve considered suicide/when the matrix isn’t enuf: Keanu Reeves, who some years ago raised hackles when he played Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane, has now written a book-length poem called Ode to Happiness that pokes fun at excessive melancholy. “I draw a hot sorrow bath/In my despair room,” it begins.
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I still have my dog-eared first printing of Dhalgren. The experience of reading it and Gravity’s Rainbow are quite similar. They were both published in the early-to-mid ’70s — maybe there was something in the water.