It’s the weekend, and you know what that means. Time to explore your creative passions. That’s right! Find what you want to do and “dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.”
Passions, Hobbies. Same Thing, Right?
What Do Celebs Read?
Books from their own imprint we hope. “In the last decade, in fact, the celebrity imprint has become something of a cottage industry, an endeavor mutually beneficial to publishing houses in pursuit of stars and their lucrative fanbases and celebrities looking for another feather in their cap.” Some of the celebrities on this list might surprise you, read on to learn about which ones have a publishing imprint.
Whitman on Poe
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” – Walt Whitman on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance, circa 1880.
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Nothing Has to Be Blown Up
“One of the joys of literature is that we can always push back against established ways of speaking and seeing—and nothing has to be blown up.” Mark Z. Danielewski, whose latest novel, the first installment of a 27-book series called The Familiar, has just been released, writes for The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series about “signiconic” writing, the orneriness of his work and the graphic novel Here. Pair with our 2012 interview with Danielewski.
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Women and Poetry: A Discussion
Elisa Gabbert organized a roundtable discussion with several female critics to explore the twinned questions a) why are more men being published than women? and b) is it because there’s “also a lack of women writing about poetry?”
Yes.
Your dandruff falls like the fixtures within a scenic railway passing through a thousand bearded rainbows… Compliment courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator! (Via.)
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For the Viral Good
As you may have heard, Twitter went public last week, which means a lot of people are trying to figure out just what its IPO means for social media. Over at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel proposes that social media, by its very nature, cannot be profitable, and thus should be administered by the state as a public good.
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Spin the Mindwheel
Do you remember the time that Robert Pinsky, translator of classic literature and former Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote a text-based video game? Don’t worry, we didn’t either.
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