Celebrate the start of baseball season and the beginning of National Poetry Month at the same time by reading Hobart’s annual Baseball Issue. This year, the site plans on rolling out “daily baseball stories, poems, essays, and other baseball miscellany,” so it’s pretty much the Venn diagram overlap of all of your April needs.
Baseball and Poetry: America’s Pastimes
God, CEO of Heaven
Here’s the story of one entrepreneur so intent on disrupting the antiquated status quo within his industry that he quit his organization and set out to found his own start-up. You’ve heard this story before. It’s John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and supposedly it can help your career in ways you haven’t even realized.
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“This is not a part of the entertainment here tonight.”
Recommended Reading: Brian Oliu’s “Owen Hart & The Finite Life of Ropes,” which is damn sure the best piece of writing you’ll ever read about a professional wrestler’s death.
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Founding Father, Remixed
George Washington as you’ve never seen him before: First, a cartoon entitled “Cox and Combs” and second, a live action avant garde take on the founding father.
The Deepest Feeling
“Love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.” Mary-Kay Wilmers for the London Review of Books reviews Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. In the book, Moore’s slightly-bizarre domestic life is examined with fairness and honesty alongside her impressive body of work. If poetry is your thing, check out our On Poetry column for more.
Bright Young Thing
Who is Samantha Shannon, and why should you care about her? Well, for starters, she’s twenty-one years old, her debut novel The Bone Season is coming out next week, and her publisher suspects she may be the next J.K. Rowling.
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Ginsberg on Williams’s Plums
The Allen Ginsberg Estate supports a regularly updated blog called The Allen Ginsberg Project. I recommend reading it. Here’s a gem of a conversation between the late poet and a student over those delicious, sweet and cold plums in William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say.”
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Most Important Meal
“Anyone reading my fiction would never guess how seriously I take food.” Extra Crispy has an interview with Junot Díaz about his diet, with particular attention given to breakfast: “I split my time between two cities so when I’m in Boston there’s a Dominican restaurant called Merengue that serves the classic Dominican breakfast of mangú, fried egg, and fried salami. I leave off the fried cheese because well, damn.” If you’re hungry for more, might we also suggest our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s ode to the day’s first meal, as it figures in both literature and life.