You’re only supposed to consume oysters in months with the letter “r” in their English (and French) names. This is because oysters in the Northern hemisphere are more likely to spoil during the warmer months of May, June, July, and August. So if you can’t eat ‘em, you might as well hear about ‘em instead, right? Presenting this video of Seamus Heaney reading his poem, “Oysters” (Text here).
Summer Oysters
For Tom Waits, Drink Everything
Do you like listening to music, but often struggle with an appropriate drink order? Enter Drinkify, a website which suggests cocktails based on the tunes you’re playing. (I tested it out with The Wu-Tang Clan. It told me to drink “1 bottle of gin.” Do with this information what you must.)
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No Lie
“One lie I tell is that we care, generally—human beings—about each other. We could not, I tell myself in the moments just before the night’s dark hour, create The Odyssey or King Lear or Thomas and Beulah without a profound sense of The Other. Surely, were it true this thing’s a joke, nothing more, and a cruel one at that, we’d have no Dickinson, no Yeats, no freakin’ Rumi, read by Bly, loud on an old tape deck while I shower.” Pablo Tanguay on the art of lying.
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Goodreads launches “Ask the Author” feature
Goodreads has launched a new Ask the Author feature, allowing readers to ask the likes of Margaret Atwood, Khaled Hosseini, and Jesmyn Ward questions “about the new worlds, ideas, and people they’ve discovered in books.”
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“And this dancing took many deaths.”
“We envision a library full of blood,” reads the “About” section of the Black Cake Records website. “We want the very best blood, & we want it everywhere.” Intrigued? You should be. The project, begun in 2013, serves as “a forum for producing & disseminating audio archives of contemporary poets reading their work.” For an introduction, you can start with “Trench Mouth” by Danniel Schoonebeek, whose debut collection, American Barricade, was published last month by YesYes Books.
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The $31K Photocopy
With the actual manuscript still missing, what was thought to be a worthless photocopy may be our best link to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The UL Lafayette Foundation agreed, paying $31,000 in an auction.
DIAGRAM’s 2012 Essay Contest
The deadline for DIAGRAM’s annual essay contest is fast approaching. Past winners include Peter Jay Shippy’s “Goonies: or Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snowman’–an Essay in 7 Films” and (my all-time favorite) Cheyenne Nimes’s “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.”
A Brief History of Gay Liberation
“If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—‘Love Wins,’ ‘It Gets Better,’ and ‘You Can Play’—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s radical roots risk being expunged from memory.” On Jim Downs’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.
Now Turn to Page Thirty
Rebecca Schuman argues in an essay for Slate that extraordinarily long course syllabi are killing the college classroom. If it’s academic homicide you’re after, you might also want to check out Cathy Day’s piece for The Millions in which she suggests that academia might just be killing the novel, too.
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