Millions staffer Mark O’Connell recently took a look at Édouard Levé’s Works. “For the most part, it’s a catalogue of unrealized creativity,” he writes. “Which in the very extensiveness of its cataloging becomes a monstrous paradox of realized creativity.” (Related: O’Connell previously reviewed Levé’s Suicide and Autoportrait for our site.)
Édouard Levé’s “Monstrous Paradox.”
Sleep Indulgence and Piñata Effigies
“BEST FEATURE: If you glance at the word it looks like it says ‘tiny axe’ which sounds very cute. It makes me picture a tiny lumberjack. WORST FEATURE: Anxiety can turn a pleasant afternoon into a sweat-drenched pair of slacks that are hard to explain.” Ted Wilson reviews anxiety (spoiler alert: it only gets one star out of five) for Electric Literature.
The Profane New Yorker
Earlier this week, The Awl diligently compiled the initial instances of various profanities in the New Yorker over the years. Now those meticulous folks at the New Yorker have offered up a number of corrections, including a visual first.
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“From Annihilation to Acceptance”
Recommended reading: Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, writes for The Atlantic about the “surreal journey” of publishing three novels in one year. Pair with VanderMeer’s Millions interview with Richard House.
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Poetry of Surveillence
“Nuclear Chelsea Air Marshal infrastructure Ionosphere Burst.” You can thank the NSA for this haiku. The NSA Haiku Generator is a website that takes commonly flagged terms and turns them into poetry. Have fun messing up the NSA’s algorithms for a day.
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One With Others
“She was to me and so many poets an exemplary and inimitable figure. And I mean to emphasize the tension between ‘exemplary’ and ‘inimitable’—what her example taught us was the necessity of going our own way, of being one with others.” Ben Lerner remembers C.D. Wright, who passed away earlier this week.
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Bookstores: Aquatic and Secret
In Karen Russell‘s Swamplandia!, there is an enchanting place known as the abandoned Library Boat. “It held a cargo of books,” Ava Bigtree explains, “In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged, undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors.” Now something similar has moored in England’s canals. And, across the Atlantic, one New Yorker is keeping his own open secret.
From Football to Fiction
Rashard Mendenhall is retiring from the Arizona Cardinals in order to write, among other reasons. “The truth is, I don’t really think my walking away is that big of deal. For me it’s saying, ‘Football was pretty cool, but I don’t want to play anymore. I want to travel the world and write!'” Maybe he’ll be published by another retired sports star’s imprint?
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