Recommended Viewing: The trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen’s forthcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis.
New Coen Brothers Trailer
An Interview in the Worst Way
We Are Champion, a handsome new online literary magazine promulgating "what Donald Barthelme called "back-broke" sentences," features an interview with the great Gary Lutz.
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“On Stage as On Paper”
There's just something about David Foster Wallace's writing that makes people want to adapt it. We've written about this phenomenon before - there have been Infinite Jest-inspired radio tributes and music videos, series of illustrations, even a novel-in-legos. Interest in adapting Wallace's work doesn't seem to be slowing, and earlier this month Public Theatre put on an experimental performance of passages of his writing and interviews, A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which both Salon and Hyperallergic reviewed.
i c wut u did thier
In an interview with the CBC, Anne Trubek makes the argument for the wide acceptance of poor spelling. Trubek also had an essay in Wired earlier this year on spelling and autocorrect.
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“manuals for a thinking person”
Jed Perl on Susan Sontag's journals: "The fascination of Sontag’s prose—and its sadness—is in the extent to which she is describing herself as a person who can never really get beyond a schematic kind of thinking and feeling."
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The Opposite of Bleak
In 1847, Charles Dickens founded a house for homeless women in the Shepherd’s Bush neighborhood of London. After setting up the center’s amenities, he publicized the house using leaflets and, upon hearing that London society was shocked that the center had a piano, spread a rumor that the center boasted a piano for every resident. At The Guardian, a look at a letter Dickens wrote to the matron of the house, to be sold at Christie’s in May. (h/t The Paris Review)
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Lemonade and Poetry
If you’ve been on the Internet in the past week, you’ve probably heard about Beyoncé’s incredible new record, Lemonade. Noah Friedman at Wordshop 101 explains why Lemonade is great press for poets (particularly Warsan Shire, who is featured in the film). Andrew Kay writes on how reading poetry aloud connects us with the dead.
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