To address the state’s ongoing financial shortfalls, California’s government announced last May that they intended to close a quarter of the state’s 278 parks by next July. Upset by the decision to save money at the expense of the state’s natural beauty, three filmmakers embarked on a 3,000 mile trip around the Golden State’s wildlife reserves, recreation areas, and parks to shoot The First 70, a gorgeous documentary about the parks being closed and the individuals fighting to preserve them. You can check out the trailer over here.
John Muir Would Be Proud
Terrible Beauty
Nobody needs reminding that Yeats was a major poet, but it can be easy to forget, a hundred years of his major work, just why his poetry has endured. In The Irish Times, Denis O’Donoghue makes a forceful case for Yeats’s relevance, arguing that “Yeats solved, or came closer than any other modern poet in English to solving, the problem that defeated so many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the claims of common speech, morally responsible, with the insisted-on autonomy of the poem.”
New DFW
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished novel, The Pale King, appears this week in The New Yorker. It’s good.
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Tune in next week
Emily Nussbaum on the poetry of cliffhangers, “which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling.”
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Between Life and Death
Over at the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines the scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, from resuscitation to galvanism.
Harlequin History
“How did a humble Canadian publisher—which got its start reprinting other companys’ books—become the name most associated with romance? It’s a long story, involving a peripatetic former fur trader and his opinionated socialite wife, a Procter-and-Gamble-trained Harvard MBA, some jilted Americans and a whole crowd of damned scribbling women.” From Pictorial comes the story of “How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance.”
Intersections and Turns
Recommended Reading: Noy Holland on writing fiction, a form rooted in deft timing, accidents, and revelations.
From a Deeper Part of the Cave
“A novel is a trek home from the desert, sometimes a journey you wish you had never started. Exhausting and humbling, just occasionally wonderful. But a short story can come from a deeper part of the cave.” Jane Gardam on why she prefers writing short stories instead of novels in The Guardian. Pair with Lisa Peet’s essay on Gardam’s organically grown characters.