Lena Dunham is the new voice of the Archie comics generation. The Girls creator will write four issues of the famous comic, coming out in 2015. She’s not the only woman joining the comics industry. DC Comics is adding a Native American teenage girl, inspired by the real Canadian Aboriginal teen activist Shannen Koostachin, to the Justice League United.
Is She a Betty or a Veronica?
“Free to make her a watery presence”
Recommended Reading: Jonathan Lee’s interview with Year in Reading favorite Rachel Kushner. The piece is a nice complement to our own interview with Kushner from last year.
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Just Saying…
William Carlos Williams was a poet born for the age of Twitter. Or, rather, his poem “This is Just to Say” is perfect for Twitter parodies. Potato, potahto.
Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.
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Rudyard the Rebel
Remember the Rudyard Kipling poem where he says the British government should be scalped? We don’t either. However, a forthcoming book of lost Kipling poems, 100 Poems: Old and New, shows his anti-establishment side. An excerpt from the aforementioned poem, “Laudatores Actoris Empti:” “Come, let us lightly scalp the brood / Of ‘educated middle classes’ / Who, much perplexed with ‘views’ and ‘goals’ / Now govern London – and our souls”
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Galway Kinnell Passes Away
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” Galway Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won a Pulitzer in 1983, passed away Tuesday.
Post-Madeline
To mark the 100th anniversary of Swann’s Way, the Times published a series of blog posts on the legacy of In Search of Lost Time. Among other things, it includes a reflection by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.
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A Horrifying Triptych
Here are three pieces about horror in honor of 2012 being the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death. 1) Yazan al-Saadi’s fascinating survey of Arabic horror cinema, which is not only “about what can frighten most Arab audiences, [but is] … also a chronicle of the abnormalities and dysfunctions lacing the underbelly of Arabic cinema as a whole.” 2) Ed Park’s essay on “the audacious enterprise” of Rosemary’s Baby. 3) Stuart Kelly’s entreaty for modern writers of horror to “raise its game.”
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