“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
“What’d You Major In?” “Big Literary Data.”
John Sunyer checks in with Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English, is the author of Distant Reading – a book in which he lays out his long-held belief that “literary study doesn’t require scholars to actually read the books.” Rather, he believes in a “new approach to literature [that] depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.”
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Pale Fire
You can’t write about Robert Lowell without writing about mental illness — the poet went through many stretches of mania and psychosis in his life. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reads a “medico-biography” of Lowell, which takes a full measure of his lifelong illness and its consequences.
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The Working World
The media world is abuzz about a former Harper’s Bazaar intern suing parent company Hearst for allegedly violating labor laws for not paying her (With reactions ranging from “She’ll never work in this town again.” to “Good for her. It’s about time!”). At least she didn’t get sucked into HuffPo’s aggregation turbine.
It Spaketh
You might think the signs would be obvious. The buildings are organic, the sky is filled with dragons, and everyone you talk to speaks languages you’ve never heard of. But you may still need some help figuring out your environs. Herewith, a few ways to tell if you’re in a high-fantasy novel.
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Don’t Read This When Hungry
Recommended Reading: Kevin Brockmeier’s essay “Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place” at The Georgia Review. “Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work.” For more Brockmeier, check out our review of his novel The Illumination.
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Men of the Stacks
A group of male librarians is “attempting to overthrow the cliché of the bespectacled, permanently shushing female library worker” with the publication of a Calendar Girls-style calendar, Men of the Stacks.
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