Erica Baum uses found language and blackboards as her canvases. “Looking closely at Baum’s work to intuit such realities is both challenging and rewarding like reading a good book.”
Art Like Reading a Good Book
Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer
In a TED Talk, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer works. You can learn “surprising things” from 500 billion words, a string of characters which put together “would stretch from here to the Moon and back ten times over.”
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“No law books, no text books, no science books. ONLY POETRY!”
The Paris Review profiles the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, located in Cambridge, MA and one of two all-poetry book stores in the nation. And speaking of bookstores – if you’re visiting Boston for AWP 2013, Ploughshares has got a whole list of literary landmarks for you to explore.
Notable Occupants
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations attracted two notable literary figures this weekend. Author and activist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) addressed protestors. Here’s the longer, uncut version of her speech. On Sunday, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Living in the End Times) gave an address as well.
A Feast for Your Eyes
As an appetizer, consider Rick Poyner’s take on the work of Pierre Faucheux, a book designer Richard Hollis called “the single most important figure in French graphic design after Cassandre.” For the main course, check out this incredible Book Cover Archive edited and maintained by Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen. Finally, as dessert, nominate your favorite book designs from 2011 for Design Observer’s “50 Books/50 Covers” contest.
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Overheard
At the LRB’s blog, J. Robert Lennon pays tribute to Russell Edson, the playwright, novelist and prose poet who passed away last week. Lennon recounts that Edson was that rare favorite author who he learned about thanks to a cassette tape. (If you like the blog post, you could also read Lennon’s most recent novel.)
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Writers on Writing
Recommended listening: Writers on Writing, a playlist of TED talks from NPR that pair well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s essay on “vertical writing” and Michelle Huneven‘s breakdown of “The Trouble With Writing.”
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Most Time Is Upside Down
“I HAVE A FLOWER. OHO. SUDDENLY WE’RE NOT SO SKEPTICAL, ARE WE?” I know it’s 2016 and he’s been dead for almost two hundred years now, but these otherwise inexplicable texts from Samuel Coleridge (by way of Mallory Ortberg at The Toast) are hilarious and totally believable. Some earlier hits include texts from Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy.
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Dolly Parton’s Song Roars with Need / And Envy
The University of Tennessee will offer history students a seminar on Dolly Parton’s life, so this is as good a time as any to revisit Sherman Alexie’s poem, “Ode to Jolene.”
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