“To fully understand poetry, familiarize yourself with the elements of a poem, such as meter, which is 3.28 feet.” Katie Burgess teaches us how to properly read a poem for The Rumpus’ Funny Women column.
Poetry for Dummies
The Reading Habits of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein
Parisian bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company is digitizing decades of its records, revealing the reading habits of its famous patrons.
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A Malpractitioner By Any Other Name?
What can we make of the fact that members of the Guantánamo Bay medical staff have adopted Shakespearean names in “an attempt to avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of detainees?” Globe Theatre artistic director Dominic Dromgoole and Guantánamo detainees lawyer Clive Stafford Smith ponder the question.
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The Comedy of Existence
“Can we ever pinpoint a person’s true identity? … How can we point to something in the world with complete accuracy, without also being meaninglessly redundant? Harpo’s answer to ‘who are you?’ is a visual-gag version of the Buddha’s infuriatingly honest answer to the same question. When asked who he was, he would say, gesturing to himself: I am thathagatha (the one who is like this).” On Groucho Marx, nihilism, and the destruction of comedy over at Slate.
T Kira Madden Revels in the Tedium of a Good Recipe
T Kira Madden discusses her favorite foods, and why soup in particular plays a prominent role in her memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls.
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Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.