The more you know! In Victorian times, sitting for a photograph could last hours due to primitive camera technology and the need for long, long exposures. This, predictably, didn’t jibe with kids, and so parents had to adopt an ingenious workaround: disguising themselves in the picture so they could physically restrain the youngsters. (Don’t miss Part 2, either.)
How They Did It Before Sears
So, You Want to Manage a Lit Mag
In a timely article for recent graduates, The Missouri Review’s managing editor Michael Nye tells the story of how he came to steward one of the most interesting literary magazines in the country. Spoiler alert: it’s important that you like reading.
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Hang Out with The Rumpus, Ctd.
Looking to fill your schedule at this year’s AWP? The Rumpus is hosting an offsite event -- featuring readings by Katie Crouch, Monica Drake, Gina Frangello and Wesley Stace -- on Thursday night at 8:30.
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Just Like in the Movies
Belle and Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson, better known (at least to this writer) as the Sultan of Twee, sits down with Rick Moody as part of the Swinging Modern Sounds feature over at The Rumpus. Among other things, Jackson says that he thinks the John Lennon album Sometime in New York City is a “total masterpiece” and says that at one point in his life he could recite the book Trainspotting.
Post-Maidan
Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
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The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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An Illusion To Think So
"We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies." This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.
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