“The gross-out factor of the last section stuck with me, but not in a way I enjoyed.” Writing workshop critiques as applied to your sex life.
Don’t Tell
Faulkner’s Inspiration; Scholar’s Denial
Did the real-life family of Edgar Wiggin Francisco III inspire some of William Faulkner’s writing? Did a group of scholars try to suppress inquiry into the matter?
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Get Your Rare Books Here
Last week the literary web was abuzz with the news that the mysterious 15th-century Voynich Manuscript would be published in a limited run; but why wait for that when you can see the manuscript yourself online now?
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Longreads.edu
The Longreads team has teamed up with Syracuse assistant professor Aileen Gallagher in order to “search for and share outstanding student work.” If you’ve read (or written) something fantastic this past school year, they encourage you to tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr.
John Sayles’s “Amigo” to Premiere in NYC August 10
The new film by master indie director John Sayles, Amigo, will premiere in New York on August 10th as the opening night presentation of the Asian American International Film Festival. Tickets just went on sale here; Sayles will be appearing in-person for a Q&A. “Amigo” is Sayles’s 17th feature film and a kind of historical companion piece to his recently released epic novel, A Moment in the Sun, published by McSweeney’s.
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The Song of the Two Walts
Walter White is the new Walt Whitman. “Both are intellectual pioneers in their fields, their legacies—centuries apart—demanding risk, casting them outside of society, gliding out into the world, liberated from societal constraints,” Kera Bolonik writes about Whitman’s influence on Breaking Bad.
Sourcing ‘The Hobbit’
In an essay for The Guardian, John Garth identifies an interesting source for parts of Tolkien‘s The Hobbit: Native American lore.
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Miraculous
“I’ve always been interested in the internal shape-changes of the poem. In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning.” An interview with Harvard’s Helen Vendler about the structure of poetry, the benefits of studying science and mathematics, and the “miraculous” voices of Shakespeare and Keats.
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The Stories We Tell
Of more than 23,000 front-page articles that appeared in The New York Times between 1939 and 1945, only 26 were about the Holocaust. Watch a powerful 18-minute mini-documentary about “how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times, and by extension, the American people.” Pair with our piece about the German traditions of the Denkmahl and Mahnmahl, two different kinds of memorials with subtle, yet important distinctions.
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