Forget learning how to fly, better practice your haiku and limerick writing skills. NASA applicants are asked to write a tweet, limerick or haiku. Is Colonel Chris Hadfield to blame?
There Once Was an Astronaut from Nantucket
The David Foster Wallace Conference
The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.
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R.I.P J.D. Salinger
Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger has died at 91. Update: The New Yorker has linked to twelve of Salinger’s stories available to subscribers online.
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A Literary Conspiracy
Gaddis, Pynchon, “Wanda Tinasky”: Jenny Hendrix looks at a real-life literary conspiracy of mistaken identity upon the re-release of “Jack Green’s” Fire the Bastards.
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Guernica Talks to Robert Thurman
“Look, if you meet someone with one leg, are you going to sit and revile them for not having the other leg? No, you’re going to be happy that they have the one and praise them for it. And get them thinking about how can we substitute for the one that’s lacking. Which are you going to do?” Robert Thurman quoting the Dalai Lama on embracing the positive in an interview in Guernica, where Thurman speaks about nonviolent resistance, the potential for a demilitarized world, and his friendship with the Dalai Lama.
Could the internet save book reviews?
Sarah Fay, associate editor of The Paris Review, has a piece in The Atlantic on the digitization of book reviewing, framed beautifully by references to George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.” She praises Bookslut, Nancy Pearl, Goodreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books for their collective skills of recommendation, reviewing, and New Criticism. I’d add The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus, The New Inquiry, The Morning News (for their annual Tournament of Books feature), and of course, The Millions.
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