It looks like it’s a poetry kind of morning. Spring is on its way, and what better way to celebrate than with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Sun’s Shame,” a poem of death and desire … and also sunshine: “All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!”
The Fleshy School
World of Redundant Forms
Recommended Reading: Over at Electric Literature, Lori Huth writes about Jeanette Winterson and contemporary war metaphor: “I wanted to feel powerful emotions commensurate with the horror of the story behind the images. I wanted to feel bewildered, and to lament, but instead I felt numb.”
I Have a Mortgage
“Over three decades of almost constant composing and recording, he would amass over sixty LPs, running the gamut from early records with his band the Mothers of Invention that helped to create the milieu we think of as the Sixties, to caustic send-ups of that same counterculture, doo-wop pastiche, tape cut-ups, film scores, gonzo cabaret, big-band charts, way out prog, show tunes, music composed entirely on and for the Synclavier digital sampler, full-score orchestral music, and thousands of scabrous, exploratory guitar solos.” On Frank Zappa, music theory wizard and occasional public intellectual.
●
●
Icon and Author
Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
Brutalised Africans Made Glasgow
Amidst increasing calls to “memorialize slavery’s ties with Glasgow in a more sensitive way,” Scottish poet Kate Tough recently published a tribute poem, “People Made Glasgow.” Tough calls on the city to install a permanent slavery exhibit, a memorial garden, or new street names as well.
Liyuan Library by Li Xiaodong Atelier
A new library has been designed for the small village of Huairou on the outskirts of Beijing. Instead of adding a new building inside the village center, the architects chose a site in the nearby mountains, a pleasant five minute walk from the village center. “In doing so we could provide a setting of clear thoughts when one consciously takes the effort to head for the reading room.”
A Sign of the Apocalypse?
The singularity is near: If you go to your Amazon recommendations page, you’ll see that you can now log into Facebook from there “to get Amazon recommendations for you and discover your friends’ Favorites and Likes.”
●
●