“I preach the radio. I do not preach thinking you must know what you are about. Faulkner had good drugs and a big radio. I recall having heard my own little radio at times. It is rare, yes, and it is, now, rarer. But you are young and have your juice, you’re still full of poop, which is the necessary requisite to tuning the radio. Got to be some poop out there, on the airwaves, or in there, in you, for you to tune it in. Cherish the poop you are full of, and work on excreting it with sound fundamentals. End of tantric wisdom.” The ever-entertaining Padgett Powell was interviewed over at LitHub for the release of his new book, Cries for Help, Various.
One Does Not Try
The Women Warriors
“As I read her words, I experienced a feeling previously unknown to me: recognition. I had always turned to books for pleasure, as portals to other places. Reading The Woman Warrior, for the first time I saw myself on every page and in every word.” For Catapult, Alexis Cheung writes about representation, being an Asian-American writer, and reading and interviewing Maxine Hong Kingston. From our archives: Kingston’s work was featured in Alexander Chee‘s 2015 Year in Reading.
Convergences
Recommended Reading: Andrea Denhoed on Flannery O’Connor.
We Read No More
Victor Hugo, when asked about the other parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy that aren’t the widely-read Inferno, had this to say: “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.” Ouch. Is this why so many of us haven’t even read Dante, despite his being a kind of cultural icon?
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Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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The Books That Shaped America
Mark Dimunation was on the committee that selected the 88 books for the Library of Congress’s current “Books That Shaped America” exhibit. Recently he did an interview with NPR‘s Lynn Neary in which he explained how he arrived at his decisions to include such works as Goodnight Moon, The Joy Of Cooking, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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Getting Graphic
Hyperallergic has excerpts from Rokudenashiko’s graphic memoir What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, which Michael Melgaard recently reviewed at The Millions.
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The End of the Rainbow
I’m feeling surprisingly broken up about this: Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday.
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Hemingway Hijinks
Just in case you didn’t know, Mallory Ortberg gives you ways to tell if you’re in a Hemingway novel at The Toast. “Everyone you know respects you. This disgusts you.”
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