Following a recent essay on the value of ambivalence, our own Mark O’Connell explores the nature of confidence in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, he writes that this year’s Web Summit convinced him that tech moguls are congenitally more confident than writers.
Should We Even Publish This?
Bold and Messy
Over at Full Stop, Josephine Livingstone writes about Eileen Myles’s hip image and the renewed success of Chelsea Girls. Also check out Stephanie LaCava’s Millions essay on how social media helped to push Myles’s book into the mainstream.
Adapted for Screen
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English Major Drama
At the Missouri Review blog, our own Tess Malone writes about the supposed death of the English major, which has lost a considerable amount of popularity in the last forty years in favor of “practical disciplines.” Among other things, she links to New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement speech, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Dyer on Unusual Histories
Ahead of the forthcoming release of Zona, Geoff Dyer rounds up five unusual histories for The Browser.
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Global Fame for a Literary Icon
"She told the students not to explain too much, that they could throw in expressions in Igbo or Yoruba or pidgin and trust the reader to get it. She told them that even if a story was autobiographical it should be shaped—that, for instance, although in life you could have ten close friends, in fiction you could not, because it was too confusing. She told them to avoid inflated language—'never purchase when you can buy.'" A delightful (and somewhat rare) long profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker.
Pride and Prejudice Continued
The short shelf of books written by Jane Austen has been recently supplemented by many imaginative efforts--Jane Austen as an amateur detective, and several works depicting Austen characters (or Jane herself) as a vampire, a zombie or some other Gothic monster. So what's next? Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James is Pride and Prejudice continued.
A DeLillo Retrospective
In its recently released third issue, The Point - a terrific Chicago-based journal of ideas - takes up the vexed question of Don DeLillo's literary significance.
From Mr. O’Connell’s article:
“I saw a keen absurdity in these barons of techno-capital, with their passionately held clichés and their cheerful belief in their personal capacity to change the world,”
That’s the best phrase I’ve read for ages! Perhaps a compromise is in order, a bit less self doubt for Mr. O’Connell and his wry, on-the-spot observations, and a bit more for the tech moguls, given their habit of foisting bug-ridden, not-ready-for-market software programs on the unsuspecting public!
Moe Murph
Dreading Next Microsoft Office Suite Upgrade