Steve Almond treks deeper into familiar territory in the latest issue of The Baffler, wherein the essayist takes on “our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” an undoubtedly strong “testament to our own impoverished comic standards.” Indeed, Almond notes, our satirists and comics today remain “careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”
Liberals! Satiricists! Call Out the Big Dogs!
Smash the Gears
As evidenced by the amazing quiz “Jonathan Franzen Gripe or YouTube Comment about Saggy Pants,” a perception exists that the widely acclaimed writer is allergic to new technology. At Slate, Benjamin Nugent argues that Franzen’s new book, The Karl Kraus Project, proves inadvertently that Franzen is less of a Luddite than we think.
“It tasted like iron and foam was coming out of our mouths”
The VQR's last issue, "The Soviet Ghost," was one of the most heart-wrenching reading experiences I've had in a long time. Now it's got a series of video interviews with Chernobyl workers to seriously depress (and also greatly inform) you all over again.
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“Perfect translation … is of course impossible.”
Ever wonder how Google Translate works? Now you know. These two pieces (one and two) on Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary are worth revisiting, too.
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Publishing Dystopia?
Scott Esposito looks into Jesse Ball's The Curfew and sees evidence of the limitations of minimalism...and marketing.
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Trolling with Amanda Palmer
Art is about connecting the dots, Amanda Palmer proposed in her keynote address on creativity and sharing art in the internet age at the 2013 Grub Muse Literary Conference earlier this month. “For every bridge you build together with your community of readers, there’s a new set of trolls who sit underneath it,” she said about the internet.
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Digital (and Australian?) Shakespeare
Now that the Folger Shakespeare Library is working to digitize the complete works of the bard, it's worth asking the question, just what did that dude sound like?
Steve Almond is an idiot and seems to completely acknowledge it in that essay.
Will strikes me as a troll who reduces “complex cultural issues to ad hominem assaults.” (Almond, S., “Liberals Are Ruining America. I Know Because I am One.” NY Times Magazine, June 8, 2012. Web.)
Glenn, not a bad quip. I was being a bit humorous, haha. But, Almond actually does discuss how much of an idiot he was/is, etc.