At The NYT Mag, Virginia Heffernan‘s “Drill, Baby, Drill” explores the possibility that drills and memorization might not be quite as oppressive as some of the kinder, gentler pedagogues of our time suggest and offers a list of aps to help aspiring rote learners (Nota Bene: VerseByHeart).
Rote She Wrote
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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The City That Reads
Before adopting the relatively unimaginative (and highly debatable) moniker “The Greatest City in America,” Baltimore, MD was for a time known as “The City That Reads.” In an essay for Poets & Writers, Jen Michalski explains how the city’s bookish reputation endures despite the motto change.
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Culture Shock
“When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, ‘influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.'”
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Load Up!
Oh, snap! Dalkey Archive Press is having its Summer Sale! 10 books for $65, or 20 books for $120.
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New Stoppard on the Way
A new Tom Stoppard play entitled “The Hard Problem” will open next January at the UK’s Dorfman Theatre. The production will be Stoppard’s first new play since “Rock N’ Roll” in 2006.
The Fiction of Borders
Molly Crabapple writes for VICE about translating Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and the fiction of citizenship. As she explains it, “Words don’t need visas, but humans do. […] Citizenship is our most loaded form of fiction.”
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It Was Nothing, Really
W.H. Auden lived a secret life, not as a man with a second family or an illicit habit but as, weirdly enough, a genuinely kind human being. He paid for a friend’s costly operation and camped outside the apartment of a woman who suffered from night terrors until she felt safe enough to sleep on her own again. So why did the poet want to hide his good deeds? He claimed he didn’t want to be admired for basic decency.