Over at Bloom check out this 3-part feature—a conversation and excerpts—on fiction writers-cum-memoirists Robin Black (If I Loved You I Would Tell You This, Life Drawing) and Natalie Serber (Shout Her Lovely Name)—former classmates at the Warren Wilson low-res MFA program, both later-life bloomers, and both “writing for their lives” in new memoirs.
Writing for Their Lives
LDS Superstar: Parker & Stone’s The Book of Mormon
Some Mormons are excited about the recent news of Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s forthcoming musical, The Book of Mormon: “How can they call us a cult once we’re headlining 52nd Street? The Jews got ‘Fiddler.’ The Catholics got ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Doubt.’ It’s our time to shine.” Read more at the Salt Lake Tribune.
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Rereading
“I’ve come to understand that I’ll rarely experience that first rush of discovery again, and perhaps that’s the problem with re-reading. It reminds us both of where we’ve been and where we can’t go again.” Sarah Seltzer wonders why do we reread books as children but not as adults? Pair with Lisa Levy‘s essay on “The Pleasures and Perils of Rereading.”
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Marksonalia
Millions contributor Tyler Malone has created a Tumblr account dedicated to the marginalia of David Markson, whose novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress was famously passed up by 54 publishers before becoming a critical darling.
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Translating the Untranslatable
Recommended Reading: In which a great translator takes on a nearly impossible project: “Schmidt violates the rules of orthography and punctuation throughout the book, and its sprawling conversations cover James Joyce, trees, magic, the moon, and Xerxes, among many other things. After getting Zettel’s Traum out of his system, Schmidt would go on to write his best works. ‘I had to write it,’ he said. ‘And such a book had to be written sometime.'”
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White Noise on White Noise
“In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, “reviews“ Taylor Swift‘s white noise for The Atlantic.
Bart the Streamer
Following the news that The Simpsons will now be available for online streaming for the first time, Myles McNutt makes the case that the world needs a Simpsons Clip Database. He justifies his sentiment by pointing out that “in a world where Simpsons references are a language for a certain generation, the ability to stream this content has tremendous value, and could push use of an app that otherwise would struggle to compete with services like Netflix.”
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