Halloween might be over, but the season of freakishly large decorative gourds lives on. Here’s a fascinating essay from The Toast on how to raise enormous pumpkins–county fair, here we come.
Shellacked Decorative Vegetables
Every height of brow
Putting aside for a moment the racist phrenological roots of the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” here’s an interesting conversation on what the difference between them means for literature now. For a historical take, check out this graphic from a 1949 edition of LIFE magazine, which taught me a real gentleman wears fuzzy tweed, and iceberg lettuce is never in style.
The Deletionist
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
Sarah Palin, White Goddess
N+1’s Marco Roth turns in an ambitious and historically nuanced exploration of white grievance in a putatively postracial America. Highly recommended.
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Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
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