Do you ever find yourself skimming novels looking for exciting words and hyperlinks? You aren’t the only one mixing up the digital and print reading worlds. Neuroscientists believe we are developing new brain circuits for skimming online information that are rewiring how we’ve approached reading for centuries. Pair with: Our essay on how writing is also changing to fit our fragmented attention span.
Short Circuit Reading
Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
If you’re in New York this weekend, join Belladonna* and Kundiman for a celebration of what would have been the 60th birthday of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar). Nine poets, including Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Sina Queyras, and Anne Waldman, will perform a staged reading from Dictee, Cha’s best known work. There will be birthday cake, projected images, scholarly contextualization, and other surprises. Saturday March 5, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2pm.
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How Should an Interview Be?
My Millions social media teammate Emily M. Keeler is probably too humble to write a Curiosity about her kickass interview with Sheila Heti. But not I, dear readers! Not I.
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Bamboozled
Minstrelsy lives: At Reuters’ Oddly Enough, blackface in Belgium.
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In the Frame
Photographers who are tired of weddings should start shooting book covers. When New Directions asked to use one of Allen Frame’s photos for the cover of Robert Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, he gave them access to his archive instead. Today, nine Frame photos have been used on Bolaño book covers. You can view them here or at New York City’s Gitterman Gallery.
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Abandon All Hope
Man, if Ian McEwan has crises of faith in fiction, how should the rest of us feel? Good question.
“Queries are unacceptable”
Recommended Reading: Willy Blackmore talking to Matthew J.X. Malady about the time he tried to be a literary agent.
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The Awl’s Poetry Section
Poet Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Feelings, and he is also the poetry editor for The Awl. So far he’s published poems from Michael Shiavo, Rebecca Keith, Ben Lerner, and many others.
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After years of suspecting this to be true, I realized that I was neglecting my own anecdotal evidence. I’m online as much, if not more, than anyone else I know – tons of skimming, etc. Yet, when I sit down to read a book or article, nope, I’m all focus and probably couldn’t skim even if I tried. I think they’re different skills entirely.
I had trouble reading some of those classics before I spent a lot of time on the internet for my job, but I have no problem switching my brain to print reading at home. The brain is adaptable enough to do both, it just needs practice.