Last week, we discussed how Teju Cole has mastered literary Twitter, and that was before we knew that he tweeted a 4,000-word essay on immigration. “A Piece of the Wall” is composed of 250 tweets written during a seven-hour period and starts with: “I hear the sound of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song.”
Teju’s Twitter Takeover
Serial
“What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.” An argument for bringing back the serialized novel in the spirit of Dickens, Thackeray and Arthur Conan Doyle from The Washington Post.
Through the Pain
Recommended Reading: Cristina Fries on Excavation by Wendy Ortiz. (h/t The Rumpus)
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Man Uses Twitter to Tweet About…His Roommate
Shhdontellsteve is a Twitter account devoted to “Steve,” the roommate of the unnamed narrator. Kind of like The Truman Show for Twitter. (As I write this, it occurs to me that this may constitute “telling Steve.” Apologies if that’s the case.)
Out There
Some writers find their voices by heading off to Europe. Others (like Thoreau in Walden) head off to the woods instead. At The Rumpus, David Biespiel writes about the year he moved to Vermont, and what it meant to see himself as “leaning into” his youth. Pair with our own Anne K. Yoder on Ken Kesey and the Oregon coast.
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The Blood Countess
Julie Delphy‘s second film as writer/director/actress is released in Europe this month. The subject is 16th century Hungarian/Transylvanian countess Erzsébet Bàthory, known for murdering young girls to bathe in their blood and considered by some the first female serial killer. Judging from the trailer, Delphy’s film doesn’t appear to equal earlier visions of the Bloody Countess (French Surrealist Valentine Penrose‘s hallucinatory biography, for example, or Terry Gilliam‘s Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci) in The Brothers Grimm).
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Special Feature: Kathryn Stripling Byer
The new issue of Story South dedicated its “Special Feature: Southern Poets” section to the work of Kathryn Stripling Byer. To wit, you can check out two of her poems – “Waiting for Bob” and “Making Myself at Home” – as well as an interview between her and Terry Kennedy, and a review of her latest collection, Descent.
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