“The rest of the morning went like that. We did synchronized clapping. We did active listening. We did a role-play exercise in which I was a girl waiting for a bus and Karloff was a masher, but when I started flirting back, she didn’t like it. I got four more cups of coffee and felt brokenhearted when my bottle gave up its last drop.” Philip Marlowe attends a court-mandated women’s studies workshop.
Tough Broads
Double, double, toil and trouble
The summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is here; The latest issue is magic themed and offers a smorgasbord of writing on sorcery, metamorphosis, and visitations. Most magic of all, much of it is available online for free!
Remembering Sendak
In remembrance of Maurice Sendak: a look at his life in pictures, a video of Sendak speaking on his 80th birthday, a 2006 profile from The New Yorker, a 2012 interview with Stephen Colbert, an illustrated conversation between Sendak and Art Spiegelman, and a touch of comedy from The Onion.
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Tonight’s Guest is a Poet
There was a time, believe it or not, when poets made appearances on widely-seen American talk shows. That time was the fifties and sixties, when Carl Sandburg appeared on The Today Show, The Ed Sullivan Show and Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. (He also gave a speech before Congress and competed on What’s My Line?)
RIP Daisy
If at some point in your life you lose a beloved pet, and if, while mourning, you decide to write an obituary, know this — whatever you write will not be as good as E.B. White’s tribute to his dog. (You can read more pieces like it in the perfectly-titled E.B. White on Dogs.)
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Sprechen?
Recently, a Czech linguist named Jakob Murian came up with an estimate of the number of languages your average European speaks. The study is complicated, however, by the question of how much you need to know to really understand a given language. At the LRB’s blog, Glen Newey asks: are you fluent when you can order a beer, or when you can translate Virgil? Pair with: Abigail Rasminsky on learning to speak German.
What Should I Title This?
Titles are hard, guys. Over at The Daily Beast, Ruth Bernard Yeazell tries to figure out why so often famous paintings have titles that don’t seem to match up with the work at all. Here are four (4) other pieces on titles — I told you, titles are hard.