“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
Ferlinghetti on Folksingers
David Meltzer interviewed renowned Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the Poetry Foundation. At 93 years of age, Ferlinghetti still contends that “the real popular poets of America” are not the people writing verse for poetry collections, but rather the folk musicians and folksingers. “A lot of folksingers’ poems are greater than the printed poems!” Ferlinghetti explains. Evidently the American Academy of Arts and Letters agrees: Bob Dylan recently became the first rock musician ever inducted into its ranks.
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Sense and Senility
What kind of writer would Jane Austen have been if she'd lived beyond her forties? We can never know, but Freya Johnston has some ideas.
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The Second Coming
"The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life." The last book The Rumpus loved? Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
I Guess There Could Be More Intersections, Too
Imagine a Venn Diagram with two circles: Paul Murray and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Now imagine its intersection. Did you think of Axl Rose? You should've.
Teju Cole’s Photography
Amitava Kumar writes complementary text for Open City author Teju Cole’s photography exhibit. You can check out Cole’s Flickr page over here.
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Marcel Proust Paid for Positive Book Reviews
"The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers." Letters by Proust, which will be auctioned off at Soethby's in Paris next month, reveal he was willing to pay handsomely for flattering references to his novel. See also: the first entry of The Millions' Hannah Gersen's column, The Proust Book Club.
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