Many if not most painters attempt self-portraits at some point, but how many of them paint self-portraits exclusively? At The Morning News, a gallery of self-portrait maven Haley Hasler’s work.
Gaze Turned Inward
“If there’s one thing I know about it’s beer”
The Wall Street Journal sent Geoff Dyer a bottle of El Segundo Brewing Company’s Blue House Citra Pale ale, and asked him to write about it. Because he’s Geoff Dyer, and there isn’t a topic (e.g. aircraft carriers, photography) on Earth that he can’t write about, he of course obliged.
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Tiphanie Yanique on the Destruction and Blessing of Love
Tiphanie Yanique discusses her second novel, Monster in the Middle, which follows the maze-like trajectory of generations of love and relationships.
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The Novel Doppelganger
Are you familiar with the concept of the novel doppelgänger? If not you should read this advice column, especially if you’re an aspiring author. What are the odds??
Sex and the City
Recommended Reading: On the reinvention of Sex and the City in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to create something recognizable and true. You could also read our interview with Yanagihara.
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Remembering Marinetti
The Smithsonian has a good reminder about the links between design and history, about how time can seemingly erode the politics behind an aesthetic movement, about the relationships between images and texts, about how Italian futurism may still look cool but came from a group of sexist and at least partially fascist men.
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“It’s the people that keep you going back”
Here’s a wonderful way to spend 77 minutes: the NYPL posted the entire video of a conversation between Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Behind the Beautiful Forevers author Katherine Boo.
Brave New Books
“In the new environment, science fiction writers needed new formulas – or even better, needed to have the courage to operate without pre-cooked recipes of any sort. In short, science fiction needed to grow up and take on the adult world, in all its messiness and uncertainty.” Ted Gioia pens a paean to sci-fi writers of the 1960s. Among his recommendations (including a reading list of 64 works): Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch, whose larger oeuvre is considered here.
Archiving the Internet
“Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time.” Jenna Wortham writes on how archiving the Internet would change history. We’ve written about the implications of the Internet more than once.