If you’re bored with the typical sexy firefighter holiday calendar, the Rhode Island Library Association can help. The Tattooed Librarians of the Ocean State 2014 calendar features Rhode Island librarians and their ink. “We’re trying to give a voice to the up-and-coming generation of librarians. We’re not your grandmother’s library,” librarian and association president Jenifer Bond said. You can buy your calendar at the site for $12-15.
Calendar Girls
Cather People
For The New Yorker Alex Ross describes the role Nebraska’s prairies played in Willa Cather’s writing, his encounters with Cather people, and how he became one himself. “From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. “
Poets Talk Back
Over at The Margins, Franny Choi, Ali Eteraz, and others respond to Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” As they put it, “Trillin is part of the ‘we’ in his poem but it’s clear that Chinese and Chinese American people are not. Instead, invoking Yellow Peril fears, Trillin speaks of the threat food from ‘more provinces’ while ignoring that those provinces are home to people, too.”
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Using a Writer’s Tools
“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Go and check out this fascinating profile of Ben Rhodes, the “Boy Wonder of the Obama Whitehouse,” who dropped out of his second year at NYU’s M.F.A. program after witnessing the attacks on September 11th to take up a life of international affairs and foreign policy. When asked about whom he would choose write the story of his work life, Rhodes picked novelist Don DeLillo: “He is the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
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Let There Be
“LET THERE BE stress. Let the body respond to stress as it does to injury and infection. Let stress be a vulture that pecks at the mind and devours the body. This will make people less likely to be stressed. When they see stress wreak wrath upon the body, they will surely calm down a lot.” It seems the big problem with intelligent design is that it had a pretty sub-par peer review.
Wherefore art thou Luke Skywalker?
Good versus evil, a hero coming of age, wars, and sibling love — Star Wars is the play William Shakespeare never wrote. Fortunately, Ian Doescher rewrote the tale of the Jedi in iambic pentameter in William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. The best part is the book trailer, which features Shakespearean actors wielding lightsabers.
“Deceptively spare”
“The art style also changes from chapter to chapter — some panels fill the pages to the edges and are overwhelming in their dark palette; some seem ordinary in proportion, confident; others fill the space around small figures with words, words, words; and others still have a minimalist, sketch-like quality and barely occupy the page at all — and they aren’t always chapters, or even stories, in the traditional sense.” On MariNaomi’s Dragon’s Breath and Other Stories.