“We live, in short, with local exceptions, in a dissociated world held together by fragile links of utility and self-promotion underpinned by laws of mutual advantage—a materialist ethos and cosmos that cannot but influence cultural representations and, hence, art, including poetry.” On John Donne and the humanity in art.
A Dissociated World
Zen and the Art of Failing at the Tour de France
What if the Tour de France nearly ground to a halt due to fiction? Imagine the best bikers in the world reading themselves into injury. At The Morning News, our own Matt Seidel imagines the chaos, making clear what happens when professional athletes meet page-turners. You could also read Matt’s essay on Tim Krabbé’s book The Rider.
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Inherent Vice’s Star-Studded Cast
Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is going to have one heck of a star-studded cast. Among the names attached to the production thus far are Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short and Sean Penn. The film is tentatively scheduled for a 2014 release. (Bonus: Take a sneak peek at Pynchon’s forthcoming novel, Bleeding Edge.)
Members of the Guild
“Why do we love our writing teachers so much? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously.” George Saunders offers a timeline of his writing education over at The New Yorker.
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Comic Fans
When Adrienne Raphel got to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she found a group of writers as addicted to fonts as she was. Over time, a “font subculture” developed among the poets, who settled on particular fonts as their signatures, at least for a while. At The Paris Review Daily, she writes about her typographic bent. Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg on the use of fonts in publishing.
Namwali Serpell Revisits Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’
Namwali Serpell reflects on the lasting legacy of Toni Morrison's landmark novel, Sula.
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