No one is unique; we all share names, but what if you met everyone who had the same name as you? At The Morning News, Jennifer Berman reached out to her doppelgängers. “I’ve thought about writing her. But what would I say? I’m Jennifer Berman, too?”
Do I Know You?
Six Plots Part II
I’ve written before about Matthew Jockers‘s claim, as reported and presented by the Paris Review, that there are only about 6 plots in fiction. Now Dan Piepenbring returns to the Review to respond to critics who and attempt to answer the questions “is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms?”
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Thoughts on a Prodigy
“The American poem was not in a grave at that time; not by any measure. There was achievement, experiment, excitement. But there was also confinement. It could be felt in the air, in an ethos of conditional acceptance. A young woman poet was not yet a familiar sight. When Auden remarked about [Adrienne] Rich’s poems, after choosing her as a Yale Younger Poet, that they were ‘neatly and modestly dressed,’ it sounded more like a counsel for the nursery than acclaim for a new writer.” At The New Republic, Eavan Boland reflects on the legacy of the poet, whose posthumous collection, Later Poems, came out last week.
Reading Material
BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
Politics and Prizes
“I lost him when he became a neo-liberal.” Certain Swedish literary critics remain outraged that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature despite abandoning his prior socialist political beliefs. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.
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19th Century Gifs
When University of Iowa Special Collections librarian Colleen Theisen found hidden fore-edge paintings on a 19th century scientific book Autumn, she made a gif of it, of course. Then, she realized there were more secret paintings for each season and more gifs followed. Who said old books weren’t interactive?
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