The age old debate: experience versus aesthetics, the real world versus the MFA world.
Write What You Experience
Vocal Harmony
At the LARB, Len Gutkin interviews Year in Reading alumnus William H. Gass, whose new novel, Middle C, incorporates techniques of twelve-tone composition. (In case you missed it, I wrote about the book a few weeks ago.)
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The New Republic’s New Reader
The New Republic, which was recently acquired by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, has started a super clean, neat little news reader.
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“Stare at us stoned like eyes determined”
Rage Against the Machine frontman Zach De La Rocha has penned a poem dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Impossible, Part Deux
Last week, the artist Jason Novak did the impossible and sketched out Finnegans Wake. Apparently it wasn’t enough, though, because now he’s drawn In Search of Lost Time.
Den Father
By now the overlap between writers and drug addicts is pretty well-known, but it wasn’t so well-known back when Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In the essay, De Quincey admitted that not only was he addicted to opium, he suspected he’d ingested more of the substance than any other man save Coleridge. (Incidentally, we reviewed a novel by Year in Reading alumnus Jeet Thayil that largely took place in an opium den.)
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Give Rock and Roll Another Name
Chuck Klosterman wonders, which rock stars will historians of the future remember?