“War veterans experience something called hypervigilance, a mental state of continual alertness for danger. I have a minor version of this, a writer’s version. For me, danger lies in the sound of a footstep, a spoken word. Anyone could destroy the fragile construction I have to make each day.” Roxana Robinson writes for VQR about the writer’s need for solitude. For more from Robinson, be sure to check out her essay for The Millions on Edith Wharton.
A Writer Away
Shear Brilliance
Recommended Reading: An essay by novelist Siri Hustvedt on the cultural significance of hair from the forthcoming collection Me, My Hair, and I in The New Republic.
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Frank O’Hara: 21st Century Poet?
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.”
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Julie Powell at Powell’s
The Julie Powell interview at Powell’s — on butchery and infidelity and self-disclosure.
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Imagine the Card Catalog
This is supercool: Hyperallergic reports programmer Jamie Zawinski has created a digital rendering of the library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story of the same name, which imagines an institution intended to house all potential books. You might also enjoy our 2013 piece about a discovered set of Borges lectures from a class the author taught in Argentina in 1966.
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The Novel vs. The Net
Sven Birkerts, still working through arguments begun in The Gutenberg Elegies, suggests in The American Scholar that “the novel and the Internet are opposites.” (via)
New Sontag E-books
As of this month, all of Susan Sontag’s books are available for purchase as e-books. This means you can grace your e-reader with The Benefactor, Sontag’s debut novel, as well as Against Interpretation, which contains the seminal essay “Notes on Camp.”