Is writing an inherently performative medium? Scott McClanahan thinks so. “I think my favorite writers are hams,” he said in an interview for The Rumpus. He also discussed staying at hotels with pimps during his book tour, indie presses, his book Crapalachia (which our own Nick Moran recommends), and his aversion to tote bags.
Hamming it up with Scott McClanahan
Till Death or Cliches Do Us Part
At the Poetry Foundation’s website, Ruth Graham tackles a strangely ubiquitous question: how does a couple go about choosing a wedding poem? (For context, it helps to keep the following quote in mind: “the aesthetics of [a personal] wedding, at least for couples of a certain age and posture, are practically set in stone: indie pop music, mason jars, white Christmas lights, wildflowers.”)
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From Wharton to Woolf
Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
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“First you take a drink … then the drink takes you.”
At The Daily Beast, Jimmy So writes about F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s penchant for alcohol. This article is best paired with On Booze, a new collection of previously unpublished Fitzgerald snippets.
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Hedging Against Future Risk
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow.
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A Handful of Links
“Though statements have been issued over the years, no one has ever provided full disclosure of the alleged 1974 government experiment called OPERATION EMU (Experimental Mitigated Universe) during which an entire Hollywood film crew, contracted by the government, disappeared in a remote section of Nevada.” Is this Web site a mysterious government coverup of the ravings of a lunatic? Neither. It’s the marketing campaign of a writer shopping his manuscript. (thanks, R.J.)The University of Nebraska Press has a blog. They’ve been plugging away at the blog since January, but I hadn’t seen it until today, when I got an email about it.New issues of The Virginia Quarterly Review and Narrative Magazine are out.
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Wanderlit
As part of their Five Books series, The Browser interviews Colin Thubron, a travel writer from the UK (and author of a recent book on Tibet) who shares his favorite books from the genre.
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Off Beat
Hollywood is romanticizing the Beat Generation in its recent adaptations of On the Road (trailer here), Big Sur (trailer here), and Kill Your Darlings, and you can blame Millennials. “In casting the authors as eternally and fundamentally adolescent, the recent revival tones down their behavior—both revolutionary and repulsive—as a sort of passing teenage phase,” Jordan Larson argues for The Atlantic.
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Hardcover Beauties
Penguin is putting out snazzy, mesmerizing, jacket-less hardcover editions of a number of classics. These remind of the old books on my parents’ shelves. You won’t be able to get your hands on these for a few months though.
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