Once upon a time, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a very proto-Speedboat kind of novel. It’s only just getting published now.
Pre-Speed
RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing passed away last night at the age of 94. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child and The Golden Notebook took home the Nobel in 2007 for “subjecting a divided civilisation to scrutiny,” in the words of the prize committee.
The New Vintage
Is hardcover the new vinyl? Over at The Literary Hub, Yahdon Israel argues for the irreplaceable magic of tactility and print books: “There’s something gratifying about being able to underline a sentence or write a response in the margin of a book, knowing with certainty that it will be there later. I can’t get that guarantee from a phone. My data could be hacked, a new upgrade could wipe its memory, my battery could die mid-sentence and cause me to lose everything I’ve typed. They say that what goes up into the Cloud must come down, but ‘they’ can’t always be trusted—least of all with the things I value most, my books.”
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“How should intellectuals write about acts of immense depravity?”
This is a fantastic piece on W. H. Auden, “The Murder of Lidice”, and the importance of the ideological and political contexts of war. Joanna Bourke writes, “the flood of poems [after the Lidice massacre] actually served to draw attention away from the people of Lidice and towards the swollen sensibilities of the poets and their readers.”
Good Morning, Poems
A dozen lullaby poems written by Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown were recently unearthed in an old trunk, and the trove is slated to be published in the United States soon.
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The Irish Console The Irish
Over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Nick Curley prescribes “five passages from great Irish writers” as a means of coping with Notre Dame’s recent loss to Alabama in the college football BCS National Championship Game.