Shakespeare was an insult master, as were Churchill, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and… Cézanne? Apparently so. In The Irish Times, Colm Tóibín reads through the painter’s letters, one of which includes a gripe that “Pissarro is an old fool [and] Monet is a wily bird.” (You could also read Claire Cameron’s Millions review of Tóibín’s latest novel.)
Van Gogh Was Cheap
And “Crude”
Over at The Atlantic Wire, Jen Doll catalogues the many words first coined by Geoffrey Chaucer, which includes such everyday staples as "dotard," "fattish," "caterwaul" and "twitter."
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Much Ado About Baltimore
One consequence of creating a beloved show is that you've got to deal with superficial paeans to it. David Simon has to know this, but he still seems cranky in this interview. Of course I'm not saying he can't be chagrined by Grantland or Vulture's recent TV brackets (which Simon singled out in subsequent remarks), but when he says he's "it's wearying" for people "to be picking [The Wire] apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time," it's a bit harder to take his side, and you feel like he hasn't watched Erlend Lavik's sophisticated and thorough video essay about The Wire's visual style. Surely analyses like this (or Žižek's, which we've mentioned before) deserve due credit.
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Meeting the Locals
If you're like me, you probably assumed you’d never read the phrase “George Saunders in O, the Oprah Magazine”, but this is where his latest piece has turned up. As part of a creative way of presenting a list of books to read, the author imagines what reading material he'd give to an alien who wants to know what it’s like to be human. For more on his work, go read our own Elizabeth Minkel on his legacy and recent collection.
Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
America’s Next Top Laureate
California’s San Mateo County is “seeking nominations for poet laureate, someone who can act as an ambassador for literary arts.” Do you have what it takes?
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