Good: The William Shakespeare Insult Generator. Better: The Martin Luther Insult Generator. Best: The P.G. Wodehouse Quote Generator.
Literary Generators
“Sing About Me”
“Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts…When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
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Where Words Go
Recommended Reading: Jenny Diski on our lost words. “So I had a thought about writing a book for the elderly, the old. Those who have lost their words more comprehensively than the friends around our lunch table, but haven’t lost themselves entirely. A book about where all the words go, where after a time they find the others and collaborate to make sentences.”
On the Bro’d
“I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong… Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off.” – From On the Bro’d, where every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is retold for Bros. (via The Rumpus)
Two Trailers from Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures
Recently I reported on the launch of Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures, a cinematic venture from the indie publishers in Ohio. Since then, a pair of teaser trailers have been released for the first films in the organization’s pipeline. One is for The Greenbrier Ghost, which was co-written by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan. The second is for The Removals, and it was directed by Orange Eats Creeps author Grace Krilanovich. (A few years back I gave TOEC some love in my Year In Reading post.)
James Franco’s Syllabus
Before James Franco’s class began, he assigned each of his students to conceive a short film inspired by a different C.K. Williams poem about “decay, but also a sense of memory and rejuvenation.” This November, the class will travel to Detroit to shoot the movie.
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Emergent Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle has announced its inaugural class of Emerging Critics, including our own Ismail Muhammad! Read his first piece for us, “Frank Ocean and the Black Male Body,” here.
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Elephant’s Memory
Over at Aeon, Alana Massey writes about memory and how the internet archives personal data. In her own words, “Because the archiving technology captures only snapshots of a site at a given time, results might not be an exact replica of the site as it was. As I learned from the fragments of our site, things such as embedded media might be missing and scripts are unlikely to work. After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory.”
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Dispatch from the Jumex Factory
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Valeria Luiselli about her novel The Story of my Teeth, literary tradition, and the writing process. Pair with Lily Meyer’s Millions review of the novel.
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