Following the release of Before Midnight, the new installment in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy of films, Michelle Orange takes another look at Linklater’s 2001 movie Waking Life. (In case you don’t remember the film’s trippy style, here’s a clip.)
I Go Salsa Dancing
The Real-Life Inspiration behind Hugo’s Quasimodo
The Telegraph reports that a new discovery appears to reveal that Quasimodo, the seemingly mythical hero of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, may have been based on a real-life figure.
The aMTrAk Residency
Remember that time Amtrak offered a 10-day train residency, and the internet experienced a collective freakout because trains are literary catnip, and then we found out it was kind of a scam? Barnard Zine Library does, too. In honor of that cultural moment, they recently sponsored an “MTA Residency” that, while less glamorous, has already yielded beautiful work.
“Bleeding beautiful streams”
“It’s easy to attribute genius to a dead man, a legendary philanderer, liar and self-mythologizer who died beautiful and curly-haired. But ‘What About This’ is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.” On Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems.
●
●
Sacred Literature
“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.