“I should probably write a few words about 2015, but the year is stale now, rung out like a damp dish rag and left to dry in the cold, dour winds of some rundown burg blasted off the map by poverty and overcast. 2015 has been recorded, logged, and filed away as History, and as an American, I abide by my country’s allergy to revisiting History.” Catapult’s Mensah Demary on the tradition of New Year’s resolutions.
Revisiting Recent History
Bowie is Among Us
Graywolf Press’s Poem of the Week is “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” by David Bowie-fan Tracy K. Smith. She writes, “Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep / Or charging through his veins.” Pair with Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s new memoir, Ordinary Light.
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The Man and His Image
Recommended Reading: Can we separate Knausgaard the writer from Knausgaard the narrator?
To Paraphrase Potter Stewart
“The more you take, the more you have to give back — the better the work has to be.” The New York Times features Year in Reading alum Rivka Galchen in dialogue with Anna Holmes (“You can’t always prove appropriation, but you usually know it when you see it”) on the distinction between artistic license and cultural theft. Pair with our review of Galchen’s Little Labors.
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Orange to withdraw sponsorship of woman’s fiction prize
Kate Mosse announced that Orange will no longer be sponsoring the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, given annually to the best work of English-language fiction written by a woman.
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Borrow Harry Potter Electronically
Amazon has announced that all seven Harry Potter books will be available via its Kindle Lending Library starting on June 19th.
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Holy the First Pitch!
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once threw out a surprisingly decent first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game while wearing a pocket protector. Seriously. Here’s our own Bill Morris with a little more on Ginsberg, Beats, and film.