Recommended Reading: Over at Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes about the importance of secrets for a child’s development and in children’s literature.
Secret Space
The Road to Progress
Over at Full Stop, Sean Minogue argues that social media can have a positive influence on a writer’s creative development. He mentions Twitter extraordinaire Teju Cole, who thinks his involvement in online discussions “comes from the non-American part of me which is saying that novelists in every other country, with the exception of the American or the Anglo-American sphere, actually consider it part of their work to engage.” Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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In Kanye Land
What happens when you put one of the biggest literary egos together with music’s biggest ego? A movie. Bret Easton Ellis is working with Kanye West on a film. “He came and asked me to write the film,” Ellis told Vice. “I didn’t want to at first. Then I listened to Yeezus…I thought, regardless of whether I’m right for this project, I want to work with whoever made this.” This is an interesting pairing because Kanye definitely isn’t a reader.
Where Is My Mind?
Do our brains determine how we write? Joyce Dyer explores the possibility that genre is influenced by how our brains are wired but wonders if that limits us. “The page may be forcing compromises that the brain, in such close relationship with the mind, must rightly refuse,” she writes.
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Save a Book
“Save one life save the world, instructs the Talmud… You can’t save every life. You can’t save every book. But you can at least throw lifelines now and then.” Susan Coll writes for The Atlantic about the power of shelving and the importance of staying hopeful, no matter how gloomy publishing becomes.
Bright Indeed
Jane Campion‘s Bright Star was released in theaters today. Read the New York Times‘ favorable review and watch a clip of Campion’s take on the romance between Romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). According to papers on both coasts, it is Cornish who shines brightest: the NYT applauds her “mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace.” You may recognize Whishaw as the demented/gifted perfumier Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Tom Tykwer‘s adaptation of Patrick Suskind‘s 2001 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murder.
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To the Arthouse
Back in 2008, Patti Smith kicked off an exhibition with a reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It may not surprise you to learn that the punk legend, after getting through one sentence, broke into “free improvisation.”
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Speculation
“The only kind of drama is human drama. What matters is how deep you dig.” At the Ploughshares blog, a case for science fiction over “dysfunctional family dramas.”