“You want to know who I am? If I wanted to have anything written on my tombstone, I would have, ‘Ask my children or ask my students.’ I actually never thought of it quite that way. That wouldn’t be a bad epitaph.” An excerpt from Studs Terkel‘s oral history of death, Will The Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, is now available online.
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
The Stanford Prison Experiment: 40 Years Later
“Forty years later,” Romesh Ratnesar writes “the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University.”
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The Size Queens release iBook/Album “To The Country”
The Size Queens re-conceptualize the album with their release of To The Country, a hybrid iBook/album whose “interpenetrations of song, text, and image” aim to generate new narrative forms. Band member/author Adam Klein writes: “We create these imagined worlds together, simultaneously uncontaminated and corrupted, through metaphor and code. ‘The country’ and the new world of applications are always polyvalent; it is impossible to make them remain at our service.” Also! This textual/aural collaboration features original stories by Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Maria Bustillos, and Joy Williams (first line reads: “Daddy didn’t want to be a social being and he didn’t want us to be social beings so here we are.“) Download To The Country here (it’s free!) and read/listen/weep.
Shout Out
Recommended Reading: Aaron Burch’s new poem “Far from the Hudson” at Big Lucks. You might want to put some Wu-Tang on when you read this.
Do Not Lick the Books
Designboom has your library porn for the day. Pair with Daniel Penev‘s appreciation of public libraries the world ’round.
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Writing the Godfather of Soul
“Kill ‘Em and Leave is [James] McBride’s own testament to [James] Brown’s philosophy. It’s a stunningly unorthodox book, indifferent to the conventions of biographical nonfiction … The book is a hybrid of forms, largely a telling of Brown’s life story and partly a telling of McBride’s search for that story, with digressions about the author’s own life, essayistic ruminations on Brown and his music, and free, looping riffs that have the energy of improvisation.” On James McBride’s unusual, unorthodox biography of the unusual, unorthodox James Brown.
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Tanenhaus—author, critic, masochist
Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, talks to Noah Charney about his life, his work, and his taste in books. Answers are typical but insightful, with one incredibly colorful exception: Tanenhaus’s ideal workplace is bizarre. (Hint: The atmosphere falls somewhere between a nuclear fallout shelter and the kind of place you would keep a hostage and it’s nothing like where we write.)
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“Jeff Koons poses next to a pig, grinning”
The recent opening of the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art has occasioned a number of rave reviews. They’re so good, in fact, that they’ve inspired Los Angeles Times writer Carolina A. Miranda to comb the write-ups for “evocative turn[s] of phrase, political metaphor[s], and references to lady parts” in order to assemble a standalone poem. Or, rather, it was standalone until artist William Powhida made a drawing out of it. (Full size drawing here.)
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