Chinese poet Su Hui composed an 841-character array in the fourth century that can be read forward, backward, horizontally, diagonally, and vertically. The poem, entitled “Xuanji Tu,” can be read in 2,848 different ways as a result.
Su Hui’s Masterpiece Palindrome
Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts
LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history’s most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances from Charles Baudelaire to John Berryman. (via bb)
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The Lives of Movie Characters
“Writing about film applies pressure to how ekphrastic writing can be possible, let alone evocative–and further, highlights questions that pertain to all kinds of writing, from honing poetic imagery to composing entire fictive worlds: how can writing engage or transform the fidelity of its subject(s)? How do you write about something so simultaneously ephemeral and fabricated, and yet intuitively, enduringly ‘real’?” For Ploughshares, Veronica Fitzpatrick on writing about film. Pair with this Millions piece on literary magazines in film and TV.
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Football Book Club: Allie Brosh’s ‘Hyperbole and a Half’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened — as well as chatting about Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, bemoaning our empty NFL-free lives, and weeping about the shittiness of our respective teams.
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Marlon James Reads
Recommended listening: Marlon James reads an excerpt from his new book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was included in our most recent Book Preview. Pair with The New York Time‘s review of the novel.
Waywords and Meansigns
Recommended listening: Waywords and Meansigns, a new project that’s set out to record Finnegans Wake in its entirety and set it to music. The complete work will be released on May 4th, but there are already a few samples available online.
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One Book, Two Covers
“What do these two books have in common?…Open each cover and you will only find similarities: They are the same book.” For The Globe and Mail, our own Claire Cameron writes about one book being marketed with two different covers and titles to appeal to different audiences. Pair with: an essay about book covers featuring headless, backless women, and another on the beauty of typewritten book covers.