“Life is weird and dumb and restrictive, but a poem can be whatever the hell you want it to be for god’s sake. Other people will always have opinions, they’re just really none of my business.” In an interview at the Lit Hub, Tommy Pico talks about poetry and his creative process.
A Voice of One’s Own
So Happy For You
Is envy really the worst form of pettiness, as Kierkegaard suggested? Maybe. The great Roman philosopher Cicero had his own, fairly radical thoughts on envy — namely, that “compassion and envy are consistent in the same man; for whoever is uneasy at any one’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity.”
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Unpredictable Lit
“These people may not take you seriously. And your boss might not either. Or your dentist or your best friend from middle school. But you who does take you seriously? Dictators. Dictators take you very seriously. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Augusto Pinochet, all rounded up writers and artists in short order. They could not afford to have the unpredictability of literature at large while they were trying to create a totalitarian state.” Wendy Willis on subversion through writing for The Rumpus.
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Listening for “Some Late-Summer Evening”
Recommended listening: The Southern Review has released a playlist perfect for summer listening, complete with five poems by Charles Simic.
Books As Balm
The New York Times reports that actress Carrie Fisher‘s books have risen to the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists following news of her death. Fisher penned the memoirs Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic, and The Princess Diarist, which just came out last month, as well as several novels, including the book-made-movie Postcards from the Edge. Our own Lydia Kiesling included Postcards on a reading list for her short-lived celebrity book club a few years back.
But When Will They Play “Free Bird?”
Meanwhile, in NPR’s recording studio, classically trained violinist Aleksey Igudesman and pianist Hyung-ki Joo perform the most original rendition of “I Will Survive” you’re going to hear all year.
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Tivoli Gardens
“Marlon James’s management of the voice and the paragraph isn’t what you’d call unpretty, and he’s good at having it both ways on a larger scale too. Reptilian black-ops masterminds out of a Robert Stone novel as well as bumbling CIA bureaucrats, baroque deaths in the bush and casual killings by the side of the road, historical and magic realism, sex and violence and a more ‘sophisticated kind of art’: the guy’s got it all.” This review of James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings from The London Review of Books is well worth the read.
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