Amidst all the controversy surrounding Go Set a Watchman, one question that gets left out is how realistic, exactly, the book is in its depiction of its setting. At Salon, Scott Timberg sits down with Professor Angela Thorburg, who makes a case that regardless of its literary qualities, Watchman is “a very accurate perspective of what’s going on here in the South.”
True South
Big, Bent Ears
This week the Paris Review launched a new online series, Big, Bent Ears, a “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty” masterminded by Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss. Each installation features “a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion,” and the first chapter overlaps Joseph Mitchell and the Big Ears Music Festival even though “the two projects seem to share little: one concerns a wordsmith, a chronicler, and preserver of fading traditions; the other, musicians challenging tradition and musical forms on a sometimes radical basis.”
●
●
The World According to Zadie
The first reviews of Zadie Smith‘s new collection of essays, Changing My Mind, are in and the general line’s a non-committal, guarded praise. I think it’s wunderkind jealousy, myself. Voici: The L.A Times review and The San Francisco Chronicle review.
VQR Debuts Redesigned Website, Lifts Paywall
The Virginia Quarterly Review launched their redesigned website this week, and it’s a sight to behold. To celebrate the occasion, the magazine has dropped its paywall through Valentine’s Day, so start exploring. I recommend starting with Kevin Young’s recent poem, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” which he composed entirely out of song lyrics.
A Massive Online Close Reading
On February 17th, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program will launch a free digital course open to everybody with an internet connection. The course is entitled “Every Atom: Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself,” and registration is now open. The course will “take a collective approach to a close reading of America’s democratic verse epic.”
●
●
Eleanor & Park on Screen
Our favorite teenage misfit couple is coming to the big screen. Dreamworks will adapt Eleanor & Park with Rainbow Rowell writing the script. Filming doesn’t begin until 2015, so you have plenty of time to read the book. Here’s our own Janet Potter’s review.
●
●
Leap Before You Look
Can the art of teaching art actually be exhibited? A new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston about the one-time Asheville, NC institution Black Mountain College asks just such questions. Black Mountain College was a controversial, short-lived bastion of free-thought and artistic expression which hosted such figures as Josef Albers, John Cage, and Robert Creeley from 1933 to 1957.
●
●
Race, Decolonial Love, and Junot Díaz
●
●