Speculations
Tale of a Jetblack Sunrise
Every year, for six months, a mysterious Twitter account tweets the Walt Whitman book Leaves of Grass in its entirety one line at a time. At The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen profiles the account, which (to the owner’s bemusement) is popular among Lana Del Rey fans.
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East of Here
Recommended Reading: This interview with the director of the National Steinbeck Center.
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Chicken Soup for the Stall
As literary genres go, bathroom graffiti ranks somewhere between obscenities carved into desks and poorly spelled comments in terms of respectability. Yet it’s still a form that could reveal interesting things, which is why a group of researchers took a series of fact-finding trips to public stalls across America. Their takeaway? “The mere fact of being in a public bathroom could be skewing how people choose to present themselves when they uncap that Sharpie.” Related: Buzz Poole on The History of American Graffiti.
Plimpton Really Would Try Anything
It turns out Martin Amis wasn’t the only literary gamer. Check out this 1980 Intellivision advertisement in which George Plimpton uses his iconic voice to slam Atari’s lineup of sports games — a full two years before Amis’ book released.
“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
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2011 PEN/Malamud Winner
Edith Pearlman takes the 2011 PEN/Malamud award in recognition of her short stories. Her most recent collection, her fourth, is Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories.
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The Writer’s Mimicry
“When is it plagiarism, when is it homage? Especially in creative writing, I get tripped up on this distinction. A trick for writer’s block: write an imitation, steal moves, learn by mimicry. For my own poem-writing, I turn to other texts all the time. I pull language, take a word I like, sometimes fragments of phrases and twist them. I get inspired, I want to model after poems I fell madly for.” On discovering another writer’s plagiarism.