If the first paragraph – and really, the entirety – of Jay Jennings’s piece about retracing the True Grit trail doesn’t make you want to drop what you’re doing and hit the road, then you and I are fundamentally different human beings.
On the True Grit Trail
Book Art V. White Supremacy
A controversial new book art exhibit is set to open at the Mansfield Library of the University of Montana on January 7th. The show, “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate,” comprises works by 100 artists all of which are made out 4000 books published by a white supremacist organization, The Church of the Creator, and sold to the Montana Human Rights Network by a disaffected member. Read the strange story of the genesis of the exhibition and see some of the works here.
Betsy Lerner’s “Big” Story
Editor Betsy Lerner (The Forest for the Trees) gives her take on what makes a story “big.”
To Antarctica We Go
Recommended Reading: Chris Jones went to Antarctica, and on the way he started believing in ghosts.
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New Takes on Proust
Add this to the roster of great literary takedowns. Apparently Evelyn Waugh once wrote the following about Proust: “Nobody told me he was a mental defective. He had no sense of time.” (This stands in stark contrast with the views of Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote in a recent Year in Reading piece that Swann’s Way is “one of those miraculous books that gets better with every re-reading.”)
The Right Kind of Ambivalence
In the latest entry in By Heart, which I’ve written about before, Thirty Girls author Susan Minot explains why she prefers to read multiple books at once instead of reading through single books from start to finish. Her reasoning? Books are “worlds to dip in and out of, and my relationship to them is continually deepening and evolving.”
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Reactive Female Characters
Melissa Hillman, the artistic director at Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, explains “A Common Problem [She Sees] In Plays By Women Playwrights. (It’s Not What You Think.)”
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