Cristine Brache curated a great list of web-poetry videos for last month’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, and she was awesome enough to post the entire playlist online for all to see.
Get Inspired
The Vampire Diaries
“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up. She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”
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Hip-Hop Close Captioning for the Lyrically Impaired
“Yeah my drop sick…and my knot thick,” boasts Li’l Wayne in “A Milli.” Sounds great, but what the hell does it mean? Rap Exegesis, a hip-hop translation service, has the answer to this and other lyrical conundrums.
Selfie Sadism
Did David Foster Wallace predict our anxiety over selfies? At The Wire, Danielle Wiener-Bronner argues that Wallace was prescient in Infinite Jest. Although videophony, his concept of video-chatting, isn’t the same thing as a selfie, the paranoia over looking good is strikingly current. “This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen.”
Translators Deserve More Accolades
Daniel Hahn reminds us that translators are vastly under appreciated. To help combat this, he created the TA First Translation prize, an award that will go to a translator for a book’s English-language debut. “There are many prizes in the book world, perhaps too many. But some exist not merely to reward one individual per year, but also to make a statement about what should be valued, and what we need more of. “
Living with Books
Sensual Data
Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir was published a few weeks ago to great critical acclaim, and this excerpt from the book on carnal writing and sensual data is evidence of why. If Karr’s your thing, we’ve mentioned her in a couple of previous Curiosities over at The Millions.
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Song of Herself
Does she contradict herself? Very well, then she contradicts herself, she is large, she contains multitudes! Is Sarah Palin the Walt Whitman of Wasilla?
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