In a piece for The Atlantic, Micah Mattix responds to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Lunch Poems with a reflection on the social media-esque quality of Frank O’Hara‘s poetry. “O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—like Facebook posts or tweets—shares, saves, and re-creates the poet’s experience of the world. He addresses others in order to combat a sense of loneliness, sharing his gossipy, sometimes snarky take of modern life, his unfiltered enthusiasm, and his boredom in a direct, conversational tone. In short, Lunch Poems, while 50 years old, is a very 21st-century book.”
Frank O’Hara: 21st Century Poet?
Curiosities: Busking for Vampires
Our friend “Tom” finds that music soothes the savage vampire.Joseph O’Neill explores the “wholesome… misanthropy” of Flannery O’Connor.The Nation offers up a depressing assessment of the book business: “It is a confused, confusing and very fluid situation, and no one can predict how books and readers will survive.””Why Donald Duck Is the Jerry Lewis of Germany“NPR talks to the author of the just published biography, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life.Daniel Green launches new online journal Critical Distance.”Will Philadelphia be the place where the American newspaper dies?” (via)The Complete Review considers Bolaño’s Amulet.
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“The truth of poetry is not the truth of history”
Philip Levine is the current US Poet Laureate, and that’s great, but wouldn’t we all rather live in this alternate world fashioned by The Onion?
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An Animated Bradbury
“You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. … The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.” Recommended viewing: an animated interview with Ray Bradbury.
“I run around my house with bacon on my head and Sam Tanenhaus is sending me notes.”
Ron Charles, the WaPo’s fiction critic and the witty and winning originator of the “video book review” genre, gets profiled in Publishers Weekly.
Warm Ups
As you might have heard, the tenth annual Morning News Tournament of Books will commence this Thursday, and to kick things off, the site held a pre-Tournament playoff round. In it, Lev Grossman and David Gutowski (aka Largehearted Boy) try to predict what Geraldine Brooks will choose as her novel of the year. (Our own Lydia Kiesling takes part on the 18th.)
Sit Down, Stephen Fry.
Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian: Stephen Fry gives stand-up comedy a go at the Royal Albert Hall but doesn’t quite have the punchlines for it.
Regarding the Pain of Others
Can confessional writing be literary? Kelly Sundberg writes, “When I sit down to write literary writing about my trauma, I am a writer first, and a trauma survivor second, but I am not ever not a trauma survivor, and as such, I am often interested in examining the roots and effects of my own trauma.”
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