“Elizabeth Hardwick, a formidable feminist in a different key, declared, ‘I don’t know what happened. She got swept too far. She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.’” On the (difficult) art and activism of Adrienne Rich.
Crystallized Political Commitments
New Lorrie Moore on the Way
Publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards spilled the beans on Twitter Thursday night: Lorrie Moore has a new short fiction collection in the pipeline. It’s slated for March 2014 release.
●
●
Oh Say Can You Sing
A high school music teacher is trying his damnedest to establish an official state song for New Jersey, which is apparently the only state in America without its own anthem. If you’re curious, here’s a list of the 49 other states and their official, state-sanctioned musical accompaniments.
●
●
The Kindle World
Apropos of Mark O’Connell‘s contemplation of the Kindle is this piece by The Guardian‘s Sam Leith on what to expect if the Kindle truly does supplant the printed book.
●
●
Art Spiegelman on Lynd Ward
At the Paris Review Daily, Art Spiegelman, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, recalls the influence of pioneering graphic novelist Lynd Ward in his introduction to Ward’s Six Novels in Woodcuts.
●
●
Is there anything Teju Cole can’t do?
Teju Cole, author of Open City (which John Knight reviewed for us), is quite the photographer. You can get a glimpse of his Flickr stream over here.
CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
You Call Those Facts? These Are Facts.
“Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date,” writes Ronald Bailey in his review of Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-life of Facts.
●
●