“In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, “reviews“ Taylor Swift‘s white noise for The Atlantic.
White Noise on White Noise
What Soderbergh is Reading
Remember back in 2011 when Steven Soderbergh made that list (PDF) of every movie, TV show, book, play and short story he had watched that year? Well according to his recent interview with New York Magazine, the book he most recently finished is Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. (And what a coincidence! The book Murray most recently blurbed is Epic Fail, our first Millions Original.)
●
●
Poet and Magician
One of the titans of Modernist poetry, Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. to her friends, was psychoanalyzed in the 1930s by none other than Sigmund Freud. Her letters to her friends describe the account in great detail, despite explicit instructions from Freud not to speak about their time together with anyone. This essay from The Millions on video games and Freud is a nice complementary piece.
Glint of the Diamond
“Andre Dubus’s literary superpower is to hit upon that one thing about a character that makes him him, or her her. And in so doing, with subtle, clever details—breadcrumbs on the trail to the nucleus of a character—he makes a reader want to keep going, because she knows exactly who these people are and has to know what happens to them.” On the Selected Stories of Andre Dubus.
●
●
●
●
Put a Bird on It
Jonathan Franzen spent the first half of his life thinking about literature, now he plans to devote the other half to birds. It looks like Freedom is becoming reality as he puts on his bird-watching binoculars again to discuss the “appalling” songbird hunting in the Mediterranean for National Geographic.
●
●
Melodious Sound Patterings
“Reaching the end of a Babstock poem, I often felt (and still often feel) stunned into a kind of numinous awe.” Stewart Cole for Partisan on Ken Babstock and the state of Canadian poetry. Continue with confidence on your quest through the Canadian canon with the help of this guide by our very own Michael Bourne.
●
●