Beer bongs are never a good idea. Besides the killer hangover you’ll inevitably wake up with the next morning, you might also steal literary art. When Mitchel Potter was a frat boy in 1987, he stole a bronze bust of Robert Frost from Wichita State University and hid it in his basement for 25 years until someone tipped off the police. Ironically, Potter didn’t even know who Frost was, but the prosecutor read “The Road Not Taken” at his trial.
Poets Before Bros
Bill Keller wants reporters to report and only report.
The New York Times‘ executive editor Bill Keller caused an uproar three months ago when he railed against Twitter and, specifically, how it was making us all dumb. (Or, after being challenged, was it for some other reason?) This month, he rails against his staff of reporters because they want to write books.
Joyce Carol Oates Is A Glass of Water
“I feel very transparent to myself. I’m more like an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality,” Joyce Carol Oates said in The New Yorker’s micro documentary about her writing life and routine. Pair with: our essay on Oates’ The Accursed.
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The Kiss
Check out a piece from Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai about an important kiss at Guernica Mag.
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The Best Episode of Science Friday Ever?
Public radio program Science Friday has quite a lineup on tap this week: “Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.” (via @maudnewton)
Gabriel García Márquez Can No Longer Write
Gabriel García Márquez can no longer write due to senile dementia, though “he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had,” announced Márquez’s brother.
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The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”