You may have heard about Google Poetics, which compiles Google Autocomplete entries that add up to a Horse_ebooks-like whole. At The Toast, Emma Jones takes these entries and writes them up as poetry proper.
What We Need Is
Sublimely Bad?
Are you lover or writer of florid longwinded codswollop? The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest might be for you.
It Never Leaves You
The English major is more than just a common course of study, friends. The English major is a way of life. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
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Acquiring the Vanities
The New York Public Library just acquired Tom Wolfe’s archives for $2.15 million. They include 190 boxes of drafts, outlines, and research for his articles and books as well as 10,000 letters from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese. But the library missed the opportunity to get one of his famous white suits because as Wolfe said, “Those are the things I really can’t part with.” Here’s one of our favorite Wolfe essays, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
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On Leading the Tiger
Dyer on ‘Reader’s Block’
A rare Geoff Dyer essay, previously unpublished in the U.S., on the curse of reader’s block, excerpted from the forthcoming Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.
Extra Salter
If you enjoyed Sonya Chung’s interview with James Salter, you’ll want to check out this video of the author reflecting on his life, and what led to his decision to “write or perish.”
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Clashing Titans, old and new fashioned
Virginia Heffernan weighs in on the whole Wikipedia v. Philip Roth thing, brilliantly pitting “Anglo-American Great Man media empires” against “Polyglot Open-Source new media”.
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