The book Wretched Writing is exactly what you think it is: a compendium of artless puns, dead metaphors and drama-turned-accidental-comedy. At The American Spectator, Matthew Walther takes a tour.
“He was always doing so”
“I’ve known you and known you and known you.”
Recommended Reading: Delaney Nolan’s recent piece in Guernica, “How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning.”
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Little Ones
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The Poetics of K-Pop
"In poetry, I realized again and again that 'failures' were in fact openings to more possibilities." Emily Yoon reflects on the poetic consequences of K-Pop for the Paris Review.
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The VIDA 2011 count
VIDA, an organization that promotes gender parity in the literary arts, has tallied up the 2011 bylines and book reviews from some of the bigger magazines . Granta was the only publication to achieve parity, but they did have an issue devoted entirely to feminism, so that may be skewing the numbers. The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, and Harper’s are not making the cut. While institutionalized misogyny in any profession presents a problem, gender quotas are probably not the answer.
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Get Your Popcorn Ready. The Criterion Collection Hits Hulu Plus.
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Got Hulu Plus? Well, start working your way through the veritable treasure trove that is the Criterion Collection. And don’t worry. If you’re as overwhelmed by the selection as I am, this top ten list by filmmaker Dean Peterson can serve as a great guide. Also, for what it’s worth, I’m partial to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.
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Generally Five Stars
“Even weeks after its publication, no one agrees on What Happened and Clinton’s ability to assess her own past. But in post-truth America, the truth that becomes history may well be decided by star-rating.” The Guardian considers how Amazon reviews became the new battlefield of US politics. Namechecked in the piece: Nancy MacLean, whom we interviewed about her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, here.
Creative Welding
How can we not link to this? Mickey Hess creates a mock-Millions essay in refashioning Cathy Day’s essay about “the novel problem” in MFA programs as “The Light-Bulb Filament Problem: 7 Thoughts on Academia’s Sheet Metal Crisis.” Clever response to the ongoing MFA debate or just plain silly?
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