“In my adolescence people spoke of ‘café intellectuals,’ not with the respect due to a sect that transmits ideas within the cramped space of a table but with the contempt reserved for those who turn their backs on reality and take refuge in vain speculation.” Juan Villoro on the writing life in Mexico City’s cafés as part of the “Writing Life Around the World” series for Electric Literature.
A Refuge for Reinventing the Real
Overshadowed But Not Overlooked
In addition to the shortlist for the IMPAC, the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows and the shortlist for the prestigious sci-fi accolades, The Hugo Awards (including the exotic subgenre Semiprozine), were announced yesterday.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Far
“I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.” Jonathan Safran Foer believes that technology is making us more detached. Pair with The New Yorker’s essay on netiquette.
●
●
First Sentence
“I cannot help feeling, on being invited to contextualize my own fiction, that the least qualified person possible has been asked. It is more still: hesitance, dread, that as a blind man in a failing aircraft I have been offered the yoke. I imagine it is the same for other writers, for the very fact that you write a story, and not a critical essay, suggests that near everything you hope to say lies outside the bounds of explicit statement.” Despite all that, here’s an essay by Greg Jackson at Granta in which he attempts to contextualize his own fiction.
●
●
The Girl With the Pigtails
Could it be for the best that Lisbeth Salander outlived her creator? Do writers own the rights to their own superstar characters, or do the rights belong to the readers? These questions and more are explored in a fascinating essay from The Atlantic. Here’s a Millions piece in which Pippi Longstocking is touted as Salander’s literary forebear.
●
●
Ethnoburb, For One Hundred
Prepare to lose a few hours on the glorified Wikipedia wormhole that is Daily Idioms, Annotated, then read this brief interview with the blog's creator, material scientist Debbie Chachra.
●
●