Over the years, Maria Popova (aka Brain Picker) has provided readers with thousands of hours of diversion. But how, exactly, does she think we will read years from now?
Reading In The Future
Nice Wall
In August of 1911, Franz Kafka and his future literary executor Max Brod paid a visit to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. It was, all told, a weird time to make such a trip, because a week before the two arrived in Paris, crafty thieves abducted the famous painting. So why did they go if there wasn't a painting to see? To look at the absence, of course. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Creepy Cervantes
A team of archaeologists just found Cervantes's body, and while that seems like a fun literary and historical event, the New Yorker's Ilan Stevens has a slightly different perspective: "Frankly, there is something creepy about bringing Cervantes back from the dead."
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Through a Bell Darkly
As you may have heard, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sylvia Plath. It also, not coincidentally, marks the release of two new biographies: American Isis (the first to draw material from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive) and Mad Girl’s Love Song (which looks at the poet’s relationship with her “big, dark, hunky boy”). Emma Garman weighs the impact of all this new scholarship at Salon.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald on YouTube
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Presidential Poetry
Much ado was made about “One Today,” Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem for president Barack Obama, but also worth checking out is Paul Muldoon’s “For Barack Obama: His Second Inauguration.”
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What About Your Head?
“None of us made love, we had only reproaches for one another. I hated that dependency and yet I couldn’t live without it.” This short piece by Mercè Rodoreda from the new issue of Harper’s Magazine is brutal and surprising. The piece is an excerpt from Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, out later this month.
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