The Art of Villanelle Isn’t Hard to Master

Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it’s not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that “the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.”

Here’s a rare recording of Ezra Pound reading his work.

On Friday, Christie’s will be auctioning off Cormac McCarthy‘s Olivetti manual typewriter, which he’s had since 1963.  Looks like you need to make sure you’ve got at least $15,000 in your checking account if you plan on bidding. (NY Times article here)