To kick off South Florida’s O, Miami poetry festival (which I’ve written about before), event organizers and WLRN staffers are asking local residents to snap photos of “a place in South Florida that means something to [them],” and “write a short poem about it including the phrase ‘this is where.’” Then, share the poems and photos on Twitter or Instagram for a chance to be featured throughout the month of April. Meanwhile, the New York Times is on it.
#ThisIsWhere The Sun Bakes Our Chancletas
Martin Amis in The Globe and Mail
Martin Amis is interviewed in The Globe and Mail: “All my novels are feminist from about 1980 on.”
Oral Histories Galore
2011 is the year of television’s oral history. On the heels of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, published last May and reviewed by n+1 here, you can now check out I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. You can whet your appetite with an excerpt here. If television’s not your thing, you can also check out New York Magazine‘s oral history of the Upright Citizens Brigade, and of the founding of Ms. magazine.
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Social Media Anxiety
Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring, talks about her latest book, American Girls, at NPR. “In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post ‘hot’ or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment.” You could also read Sarah Labrie’s essay on social (media) anxiety.
Sullivan on Ska
Who invented ska music? John Jeremiah Sullivan traces the history of the genre in his latest essay for The Oxford American. “The more the claims for Rosco Gordon’s supremacy as a ska progenitor seem not out of proportion, and the less crazy it feels to say that, in a sense, ska was born in Tennessee.” Pair with: Sullivan’s essay on Bunny Wailer, who makes a cameo in his ska essay.
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Argentinian Pension Plan for Writers
Argentina may be offering a $940/month pension plan for writers. Eligibility requirements include 20 years of work in “literary creation” and five published works with ISBN numbers. This bill was proposed amidst the festivities of the Buenos Aires International Book Expo, one of the biggest book expos in the world.
The Marshmallow Mystery
Would you eat the marshmallow or would you resist temptation? That is the question. Our own Michael Bourne gets to the meat of why the mallow experiment fascinates us at The New York Times Magazine. “The tale of the marshmallows, as presented in Goleman’s book, read like some science-age Calvinist parable. Was I one of the elect, I wondered, a child blessed with the moral fortitude to resist temptation? Or was I doomed from age 4 to a life of impulse-driven gluttony?”
Foxcatcher
You’ve probably taken one of those quizzes that lets you find out the nature of your spirit animal. If so, you’ll enjoy this novel take on the form, which lets you see which animal from a famous poem you are. (For the record, this writer got Marianne Moore’s immortal fish.)
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