The Missouri Review interview with Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut. If you’ve yet to stumble upon the decade old literary blog, you might want to start with this recent post from Kevin Frazier on Edith Wharton and Julian Barnes. Or this treat from the archives about Monica McFawn Robinson trying to construct an undergraduate course syllabus on love.
“The only option is to participate.”
On the Rise and Fall of John Horne Burns
How do you describe the life and times of John Horne Burns? He was in turn a military intelligence officer, a schoolteacher, a critical darling after he published The Gallery, a pariah after he published anything else, and a gay man in post-WWII America. In characteristic concision, Ernest Hemingway summed the whole thing up thusly: “There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school, and then he just blew himself up.”
Social Graces
Some people go by alphabet, others by subject, and still others arrange their books as they “would seat guests at a dinner party.”
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Oppa Sijo Style
Forget “Gangnam Style.” The next Korean musical craze should involve the sijo (pronounced “shee-jo”), a type of poem dating back to the 1300s, and, “up until the 20th century … was mostly composed and sung, not written and published.” You can listen to a performance of Yi Cho’nyön’s “Moonlight Pear Blossoms” over here.
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Treme vs. The World
“American television has been a juvenile medium for most of its existence,” David Simon tells Salon. This defense of ‘Treme’ was published three days after David Thier called the show “deeply boring” in The Atlantic. “There is nothing New Orleans loves so much as New Orleans” Thier says, “but the show can’t get past the desire to be authentic.” Sarah Broom, during last May’s PEN World Voices Festival, said “this ‘love of place’ is really just from people who are stuck in a lots of ways.” But hey, at least the show’s attention to detail is admirable.