Seth Colter Walls shares some Sun Ra tracks while commenting on the conclusion of his Arkestra’s tour in Lincoln Center. As always, any piece about the musician is enriched with a reading of Jake Adam York’s poem, “At Sun Ra’s Grave.”
Sun Ra’s True Birthday
Can We Keep “Making It New”?
Recommended reading: Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser debate the continued possibility and relevance of Ezra Pound's "Make it New" for The New York Times Books Bookends.
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Pixar Concept Art Released
Pixar got the 2013 film buzz started early by sending out four images of concept art to ComingSoon.net prior to New Year's Day. The artwork provides teaser images of films in the pipeline through 2016.
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Getcha Popcorn Ready
Think of this as the film world's equivalent of our Great Book Preview: Metacritic pores over the "50 Most-Anticipated Films" of the coming year.
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Lit on YouTube
For Electric Literature Jennifer Baker interviews Yahdon Israel who hosts the weekly literary interview series LIT on Youtube. On his inspiration for starting the show; "I watch a great deal of interviews on the Breakfast Club, James Lipton’s Inside the Actors Studio, Sway in the Morning, Hot 97, Between Two Ferns. And the people who are seldom interviewed are writers. In many ways being Black has taught me to notice what isn’t there. That lens lends itself to what I notice about pop culture: We’re missing from the conversation. Better put: We’re not included. And by “we” I mean writers." Watch the show and subscribe, some interviews include Kaitlyn Greenidge, Claire Messaud, Victor LaValle and Jesmyn Ward.
“Loving” to Read
"We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?" Joshua Rothman on "The History of 'Loving' to Read."
Valleyspeak
Curious to know what the new Most Irritating Word is? Not many people agree on the number one offender, but for a while a top choice was “literally,” which evolved so much over the past few decades that the Oxford English Dictionary revised its official definition. At Slate, Katy Waldman proposed that we give the title to “amazeballs.” Now, in The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz makes the case for “disruptive,” the scourge of the tech world.
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