A couple weeks ago, Darcey Steinke wrote an essay for The Millions in which she remembered her friendship with Barry Hannah. She went into detail about the freewheeling energy of his prose. Now, in a review of Steinke’s latest for Bookforum, Lisa Locascio writes about the author’s own talents. “Many authors bounce the sacred and profane against each another; Steinke blasts them together with the intensity of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC),” she writes.
That Kinetic Feeling
Smile!
"Publishing is also an industry that selectively values a kind of swaggering authenticity that would never capitulate to demands for something so banal as being nice. But authenticity is too often a short hand for callous, aloof, or honest for the purpose of cruelty rather than truth-seeking." Alana Massey writes about the "niceness" of publishing.
A Cure for Writer’s Block
"Don’t discount the two greatest cures for [writer's] Block: plagiarism and suicide." Joshua Cohen dispenses some curious advice to writers at Ask the Paris Review.
Is That a Manuscript in Your Pants, or…?
“Success in writing takes serious commitment and a willingness to devote thousands of hours to the craft of having sex with key publishing professionals.”
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No Fake Readers
"An appreciation of readers as diverse individuals with different tastes should be a basic tenet of criticism. Instead, it’s common for critics to imagine that their aesthetic preferences are the reflections of “readers” or a special class of readers—“serious readers,” “imaginative readers,” “brave readers,” or some other ill-defined category—whose views truly matter." Lincoln Michel explains why "there's no such thing as a fake reader" in an essay for Electric Literature.
Antidote Man
According to Smithsonian Magazine, Buzzfeed is the mortal enemy of the highbrow Lapham’s Quarterly. Regardless of which source of media you side with in the rivalry, it’s worth reading through their profile of Lewis Lapham.
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Perils of the Humanities Students
In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain's abundance of "students choosing to read humanities at university." As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, "we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts."
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“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”