A belated welcome to the newest Millions staff writer Janet Potter. Janet is a Chicago writer and indie bookstore vet who’s already written several pieces for us on a number of books, most notably her controversial takedown of Stieg Larsson.
A Belated Welcome
Recommended Reading: Rose McLarney
Recommended Reading: The Missouri Review’s poem of the week is Rose McLarney’s “Arcadia” from the fall 2013 issue. “It’s the feeling of the inquiry, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?,’ a traveler gets when she walks into a new place and still, somehow, recognizes a quality in a face, or can somehow hum a refrain in an otherwise strange song,” she writes about her poetry.
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Do You Hear A Cricket?
John Cage–renowned composer, music theorist, writer, artist, and Zen enthusiast–is a a veritable treasure trove of Curiosities. Here’s a video from 1973 of Cage performing his most famous piece, 4’33”, in Harvard Square. It’s hard for even the man himself to top the genius of this inspired performance, however.
A Review in Verse
There’s a new Seuss book, What Pet Should I Get?, due out in a week, and Michiko Kakutani has reviewed it in verse for the New York Times. A sample:
“Yes, yes, it’s truer than true:
The great doctor made fun that was funny!
His creatures are shaggy and splendid and squishy,
In a cosmos uncertain but sunny.”
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Twitter Fiction
“I rather like the idea of just using a few brushstrokes to create a whole world. And, of course, with Twitter you do that, you can tell a very big story in a few lines.” Books and Arts Daily talks with Alexander McCall Smith about the new art of Twitter fiction. Pair with the full text of David Mitchell‘s Twitter story “The Right Sort,” exclusively on The Millions.
Packing (Books) for Mars
What do you do when you’re trapped in a Mars-bound space capsule for five hundred and twenty days? Well, if you’re like Italian/Colombian space engineer Diego Urbina, you read twenty seven books, including those by Gabriel García Márquez.
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Literature By The Numbers
The New York Times reports that the titles of every British book published in English in the 19th century (1,681,161, to be exact) are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer insight into the Victorian mind.
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“The Ukraine is Weak!”
Ever wonder why some countries get a fancy “the” in front of their names?
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