Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Ada Lovelace Day
This Tuesday marked the celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, commemorating the world’s first computer programmer (who also happened to be Lord Byron’s daughter). Sydney Padua has published a graphic novel about Lovelace and Charles Babbage, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer. Check out scenes from the story and read more about Lovelace at Brain Pickings.
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All That We Love
“Maybe I [felt] a shift in responsibility when I had kids. I wanted the work I was doing, whatever it was, to be something that could be meaningful to them one day. That’s where the germ of the memoir came from. I thought that perhaps writing about my parents and where I came from would one day be helpful for my kids.” For Guernica, Christopher Kondrich interviews Tracy K. Smith about writing a memoir, the presence of David Bowie in her Life on Mars, and her reverence for the cosmic. Also check out Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light.
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The Modern Office
Our own Lydia Kiesling writes for The New Yorker about workplace fiction by women. As she puts it, “If the author is a woman, workplace fiction is also domestic fiction, easily disguised as ‘chick lit,’ ‘girlfriend literature,’ or even ‘erotica.’ Regardless of the packaging, these books provide mapping, contextualizing, and rich illustration of women’s working lives.” For more of her writing, check out her essay on the San Francisco housing market for The Millions.
A Chinese Finnegan
"May God give me the courage to finish it:" The London Review of Books profiles one woman's attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
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The Caged Bird Raps
Maya Angelou is a rapper now. The late writer's poems have been layered with hip-hop beats for a new album, Caged Bird Songs. The album uses previous recordings of Angelou and a few made last year. "She saw (hip-hop) as this generation's way of speaking and conveying a message," her grandson Colin A. Johnson said. Pair with: Our tribute to Angelou.
“Jawline of an aircraft carrier”
“It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it’s both daring and brilliant.” At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir is surprised by Anna Karenina.
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Oyster Pirate Turned Novelist
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the surprising day jobs of writers.
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