The Onion continues its blockbuster literary coverage with a look into the mind of an ordinary English professor. Her epiphany? No matter what she says, her students will believe her.
Jane Austen Was Born in a Log Cabin
Whoopee Cushion
"Let the buppie and the arts section go to hell: Swiss Army Man is a film by which critics ought to judge ourselves. We have seen this movie before, in our dreams, when we were children. Its extraordinary contact with our oldest forms of storytelling seems to have rendered it an unintelligible novelty, but if we can’t see how gracefully everything in it matters to everything else in it — plot to character development to dialogue to music to art direction to setting to acting to cinematography — then there’s something wrong with us." Daniel Radcliffe stars as a semi-animate, gas-filled corpse with amnesia in Swiss Army Man -- a movie about farts. But what else is it about?
●
●
Action!
Recommended Reading: This lengthy piece from The New York Times on the history of Yiddish theater from schtick to stardom.
●
●
Books of New York
Martin Scorsese is finally making a movie without Leonardo DiCaprio. He and David Tedeschi are working on a documentary about The New York Review of Books. It will cover the publication's history and feature new footage of Joan Didion and Michael Chabon, among others. The film is a work in progress but will premiere at Berlinale next month.
Vitality/Banality
To prepare us for the release of Italo Calvino’s letters, the editors at Page-Turner are running excerpts from the book. In their latest installment -- following their first two -- Calvino describes New York City, which “swallowed [him] up like a carnivorous plant.”
Allison Parrish’s Generated Novel
Two years ago, Allison Parrish produced a diary of an expedition through “fantastical places that do not exist.” The twist? The diary was generated by a computer program, which extracted more than 5,700 sentences drawn from Project Gutenberg and later recombined at random by “switching out grammatical constituents.” An extract of the finished work, interspersed with Parrish’s nonfiction essay, can be read here.
Take the Proust Questionnaire, Discover Your Secret Affinities With Creepy People
I can think of no more disturbing way to waste your time than to take "The Proust Questionnaire." Celebrities most like me: Barbara Walters and Karl Rove.
●
●
Poetry & the Environment: Answering the Big Questions
"The ideas people project onto me are just that: their projections. And to a certain extent I can choose whether or not to accept them. But these projections also put me in peril, which is why I need to cultivate love. What’s more interesting to me is how I overcome the limiting biases that are projected onto me. If I didn’t discover positive paths, my experiences — and books — would be unbearably devastating. I am always more concerned with the path toward hope and change."
Camille Dungy, esteemed poet and essayist in Sun Magazine answering the big questions on the environment, race, religion and Trump.