Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”
The End of Beauty
The Back of the Face
"A neck cannot be modern. A neck is in time, belongs to time, but is not formed by it. My guess is that even photos of Neanderthal necks would not differ significantly... [They are] in a certain sense, pure nature. Something that grows in a certain place, the way tree trunks grow, or mussels, fungi, moss." Recommended reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard on the sanctity of bodies, the nature of truth, and the back of the neck. The third volume of Knausgaard's bestselling My Struggle hit American bookshelves last week. (Check out our own review of Knausgaard's previous volumes.)
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On Violence
“They couldn’t testify because they were dead so I wanted to lend my own body and voice to them.” Han Kang on writing about the Gwangju massacre and her slim novels, Human Acts and The Vegetarian.
Project Book Deal
There are reality TV shows for aspiring designers, singers, and chefs, so what about writers? The Italian reality show Masterpiece will pit writers against each other in competition for a book deal. As judge Giancarlo De Cataldo said, “The book is dying, and we must do everything we can to save it. Even a talent show.” We expect a lot of dramatic crying at typewriters.
Beautiful Again, and Interesting, and Modern
Have we entered into the age of New Modernism? Better yet, what does “New Modernism” even mean? Let regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark explain it to you in his essay for LitHub on George Saunders, Alexandra Kleeman, and experimental feeling. This Millions review of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? is particularly relevant.
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In Defense of Anti-Writing
Over at the handsomely redesigned Open Letters Monthly, yours truly weighs in on William T. Vollmann.
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The Latest in Obama Lit
Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama's first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days.
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Why I am Leaving Two Links in this Curiousity.
First Greg Smith aired his parting grievances with Goldman Sachs in the New York Times, and now M.B. Cluckerton is leaving the Muppets.