Recommended Reading: London’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted. Broadly spoke to some of the women who are taking to the streets to save the space.
Fighting for Space
Pentecosts
On bad days, when his writer’s block was at its worst, Hart Crane wrote bizarre, feverish prose poetry as a way of juicing his creative synapses. Understandably, he never published this poetry, but now, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, we can read it in its original form. Sample quote: “I held the crupper by a lasso conscripted from white mice tails spliced to the fore-top gallant.”
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Rewarding Attention
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova meditates on attention and the works of Simone Weil, among them Gravity and Grace. Popova writes that Weil “wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.”
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Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition -- as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex -- in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was "more than one person.”
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Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet's life in NYC: Frank O'Hara it ain't. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
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The Ball Is a Woman
“Now I get paid to do something I have loved since I was 4 years old. Other than my family, is there anything else I have loved so unconditionally, for so long?” Georgia Cloepfil in N+1 on the uncompromising, compromised life of the professional female athlete. See also: some thoughts about hosting the World Cup.
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The Wire
The October 15 Boston Book Festival boasts a lot of wonders, but one event you shouldn't miss is "The Wire" writer and producer George Pelecanos alongside series cast members. They'll discuss "issues of race, class, and institutional failure as portrayed by the most critically-acclaimed series in television history." Last month, a similar event was held at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe to launch the issue of Criticism dedicated to "Why The Wire (Still) Matters".
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