“You’re following some cute glyph about smoking, then one about stationary, then dirty dishes and some mischievous cat—then it’s suddenly ‘Not your father’s safari jacket’ followed by pearl puddles, LIBERATOR dildos, Quaker teens, rehab, troubled teens, and more jackets. It’s like a mini-Buñuel movie! And they expect you to keep following along with Malcolm Gladwell, or whoever it is, over there to the left? Why would you? You want to shout, Hey Malcolm, can you shut up about Twitter and explain the neo-surrealist montage unfolding perversely in the margins?” The strange amalgamation that is the magazine ad column.
Copy Craze
Sarah Gerard on Revisiting Unfinished Work
Sarah Gerard offers a suggestion for a small act of creation that can set your mind in order during moments of turmoil.
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Hang Out with The Rumpus, Ctd.
Looking to fill your schedule at this year’s AWP? The Rumpus is hosting an offsite event — featuring readings by Katie Crouch, Monica Drake, Gina Frangello and Wesley Stace — on Thursday night at 8:30.
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Otherworldly
No one knows quite how to categorize Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Unreality, in part because it has elements of a novel, a memoir and a long poem. The early 20th century Romanian writer chronicled his own slow death and the effect it had on his senses. At The Paris Review Daily, Andrei Codrescu writes about a reissue of the book.
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Boy Geniuses
A snarky take on Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze‘s Wild Things and a positively damning view of Wes Anderson‘s behavior during the filming of his forthcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, all available at Gawker.
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Williams Reads “Stuff”
Recommended Listening: Joy Williams reads her story “Stuff” from The New Yorker’s July 25th issue.