“This is the first time that the college has embarked on such a robust process for measuring Core Educational Competency In Reading Things In Books And Writing About Them, and we really can’t do it without your mandated participation. We have devised this rubric in consultation with the Office of Institutional Research About the Institution, which tirelessly gathers data and then enters it into spreadsheets. Please see their Statement of Very Worthy Goals in attachment 6.”
Book Learnin’
O Pioneer!
Audiobook fans take note: Our Millions original ebook The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes is now available from Audible.com.
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Magical Listening
At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion’s Salvador and finds that it remains “immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror.”
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Talking Covers with Jonathen Lethem
Sean Manning (of Talking Covers) hosted a discussion with Jonathan Lethem last week at LA’s Last Bookstore. You can check out video and audio of the event over here, and the post also features an exclusive glimpse at the cover art for Lethem’s forthcoming novel Dissident Gardens. (Bonus: a look at Dissident Gardens in our Great 2013 Book Preview.)
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The Lives of Movie Characters
“Writing about film applies pressure to how ekphrastic writing can be possible, let alone evocative–and further, highlights questions that pertain to all kinds of writing, from honing poetic imagery to composing entire fictive worlds: how can writing engage or transform the fidelity of its subject(s)? How do you write about something so simultaneously ephemeral and fabricated, and yet intuitively, enduringly ‘real’?” For Ploughshares, Veronica Fitzpatrick on writing about film. Pair with this Millions piece on literary magazines in film and TV.
A Caricature of ‘Not a Good Person’
“Because what [narcissists] have inside is empty space, they have had to make a study of the selves of others in order to invent something that looks and sounds like one. Narcissists are imitators par excellence. And they do not copy the small, boring parts of selves. They take what they think are the biggest, most impressive parts of other selves, and devise a hologram of self that seems superpowered. Let’s call it ‘selfiness,’ this simulacrum of a superpowered self.” Go enjoy this excerpt from Kristin Dombek’s new book The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism.
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Rachel Kushner Immerses Herself in the Unknown World
Rachel Kushner shares the process behind her new collection of essays, The Hard Crowd, which she wrote through a direct, hands-on approach.
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Proust’s Lost Time
Between June 2009 and December 2010, Michael Norris explored Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in a series illustrated with original artwork by David Richardson. Litkicks has posted the entire stunning sequence on its site.