“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
Katherine Mansfield: Book Reviewer
In a short biographical piece for Open Letters Monthly, Sam Sacks writes about the book reviewing career of Katherine Mansfield and the ways in which it “helped her build the writing muscles needed” to finish her masterful short stories. While some critics might take umbrage at the way Sacks characterizes Mansfield as “turning out deadline copy like an ink-stained Fleet Street hack,” his look into her reviews culminates in the realization that “the point [of reviewing books] is not to be constructive but to construct something of lasting value in the little space and little time you’re granted. Like all writing, it should be a passion, not a pastime. The point is to dazzle.”
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Mary Ruefle Reads Her Work
Listen to Mary Ruefle read two of her poems over at The Poetry Foundation: “White Buttons” and “Shalimar.”
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A Literary Pathway
Recommended Reading: On the work of Aleksandar Hemon and how literature helps us cope.
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Gaze Turned Inward
Many if not most painters attempt self-portraits at some point, but how many of them paint self-portraits exclusively? At The Morning News, a gallery of self-portrait maven Haley Hasler’s work.
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You Know AP and Chicago Style. Now learn CIA style.
Among the recommendations and rules listed in the CIA’s official style guide: favor the active voice; keep sentences and paragraphs short; boats should not be referred to with gendered pronouns; and the “w” in “Vietnam war” should be lower case because war wasn’t officially declared.
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Finnegans Wake Hits Chinese Shelves
I don’t know how they managed to translate the thunderwords into Chinese, but if sales figures indicate success, they did a bang up job. Finnegans Wake is huge in China right now.
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Inferno (A Poet’s Recommendation)
Looking for some new poetry? Inferno author Eileen Myles pens a ringing endorsement of Erica Kaufman’s Instant Classic. The book has “haunted and befuddled” her for over a year, she writes.
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