New Yorkers: tonight you can party with the likes of Sam Lipsyte, Colson Whitehead, Amber Tamblyn, Andrew McCarthy, Nato Green, Nick Flynn, Janine Brito, K. Flay and a whole bunch of the writers for The Rumpus. All it takes is $10 at the door. Festivities begin at Brooklyn’s Public Assembly at 7pm. Details can be found here.
Come Out and Party with The Rumpus
“Rote lessons before the air raid drill”
At The Atlantic, Caleb Crain (of Necessary Errors and n+1 fame) writes about the galvanizing effects of memorizing his favorite poem. (If you’re wondering, the poem in question is W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone.”)
Mount Airy, North Carolina
Carve out some time today, and let Evan Smith Rakoff show you how a wonderful essay about Andy Griffith can also be about Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, John Keats, ambition, nostalgia, the Hollywood blacklist, class, and grief.
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General Spring Feelings
“Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. Even after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease left Millar unable to reply, Welty wrote him.” On the enduring friendship and almost-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald from The Paris Review.
Perfectly Imperfect Proust
In a piece for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes about a new life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the first translator of Proust into English, and about the strange success and beauty his imperfect translation of Remembrance of Things Past achieved. The essay as a whole pairs well with both our own Bill Morris‘s essay against literary biography and Barclay Bram Shoemaker‘s Millions review of Mo Yan‘s Frog and “the trouble with translation.”
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