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.
Pale Fire
New Borges Editions
These new Penguin Classics editions of Jorge Luis Borges’ essays and poetry make a nice set, with the covers of each of the five books displaying a different rendering of Borges’ portrait.
DJ Poet Laureate
California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera dropped in on NPR as guest DJ last week, and you can listen to the full thirty-minute radio show, as well as five of the tracks he played.
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Gary Shteyngart, Viral Video Star
It seems like Gary Shteyngart may be embarking on a new career as a viral video star (remember his wacky book trailer for the hardcover of Super Sad True Love Story?). Here he is with Paul Giamatti in a “buddy comedy” touting the paperback.
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On DJ Mad Eskimo, Tumivut, Eskimocentricity, and Tagoona
Recommended Reading: Justin Nobel’s profile of the Inuit rap scene entitled (wait for it) “Ice, Ice Baby.”
“Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
Proclaiming the death of the book has been in vogue nearly as long as the book itself. Leah Price presents a short history of our pessimism for the future of the written word.
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Of Man’s First Disobedience
Simon DeDeo writes for AGNI about the first line of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s first disobedience. As he explains it, “The line is a syllable too much. In Milton’s blank verse epic—iambic pentameter, five sets of two-syllable feet—the opening has eleven syllables, not ten.”
Making a Place Worth Living
“It is difficult for them to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public’s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so.” For Time magazine’s American South issue Jesmyn Ward writes about her decision to return home to Mississippi.