“Reaching the end of a Babstock poem, I often felt (and still often feel) stunned into a kind of numinous awe.” Stewart Cole for Partisan on Ken Babstock and the state of Canadian poetry. Continue with confidence on your quest through the Canadian canon with the help of this guide by our very own Michael Bourne.
Melodious Sound Patterings
Many Unusual Deaths
Wikipedia Find of the Week: List of unusual deaths. For example, “Draco, Athenian law-maker, was smothered to death by gifts of cloaks showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre on Aegina.”
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Bookless in Laredo
As of last week, Laredo, Texas, a city of 250,000 people has no bookstore. A sign of the coming apocalypse or a great business opportunity? You decide.
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This Is Not a Novel
Lindsey Drager considers the novella and argues that it is neither a feminine form nor a smaller type of novel. As she puts it, “while other fiction aims outward, the novella curls in, coiling around itself until there’s no distinction between the story’s body and the story’s shell.” Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone’s essay on the art of the novella.
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Novel Projects
“Well, is ‘addiction’ what a literary writer should want in readers? And if a writer accepts such addiction, or even rejoices in it, as Murakami seems to, doesn’t it put pressure on him, as pusher, to offer more of the same?” Tim Parks writes for the NYRB about writers who keep producing more of the same to please hungry readers.
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Hemingway Double Shot
Got a couple thousand bucks lying around? You can place a bid on one of Ernest Hemingway’s love letters. Or, for a more modest price of “free,” you can read Tim Weed’s rumination entitled “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana.”
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The Lost Female Beat Poet
The Beat Generation was such a largely male-dominated literary movement that its few female writers have mostly been forgotten. At The Toast, Megan Keeling remembers Beat poet Elise Cowen, who is mostly known as Allen Ginsberg’s paramour but also wrote poetry of her own. “Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.” A collection of her poetry, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, was just published.
Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/24/elise-cowen-and-the-female-beat-poets/#W1BLwQlomazyFTiH.99
Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/24/elise-cowen-and-the-female-beat-poets/#W1BLwQlomazyFTiH.99
Finding Peter Cat
We already knew that Haruki Murakami was a writer and runner but a former jazz club owner, too? Aaron Gilbreath visited Murakami’s 1970s jazz club, Peter Cat, and found “a drab three-story cement building. Outside, a first-floor, a restaurant had set up a sampuru display of plastic foods.” For more Murakami, read our review of 1Q84.
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