“Could I write a novel about fugues in the form of a fugue?” Margot Singer wonders in The Paris Review, remembering the process of writing her first novel and considering other authors – Joyce, Nabokov, Woolf – who have tried to compose words musically. See also: our own Jacob Lambert on whether to write with background music on.
In a Fugue State
World Book Night
A committee headed by the author Tracy Chevalier this week unveiled the lineup of twenty-five specially printed titles which will be distributed by thousands of volunteers across the UK on April 23, 2012 as part of an international celebration of reading.
Chicken Soup for the Stall
As literary genres go, bathroom graffiti ranks somewhere between obscenities carved into desks and poorly spelled comments in terms of respectability. Yet it’s still a form that could reveal interesting things, which is why a group of researchers took a series of fact-finding trips to public stalls across America. Their takeaway? “The mere fact of being in a public bathroom could be skewing how people choose to present themselves when they uncap that Sharpie.” Related: Buzz Poole on The History of American Graffiti.
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The Right to Complain
It’s a truth as old as academia: graduate students moan about the lengths of their dissertations. But which grad students are most entitled to complain? Herewith, a chart that compares dissertation lengths by major.
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Death of a Death
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Literary Interference
To celebrate the beginning of football season, read about how Jack Kerouac’s years of high school football might have led to his alcoholism and depression.
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Goodbye, Friday Night Lights
It’s been one week since the “Friday Night Lights” finale aired on network television, and it seems as though the entire internet is grieving. Two Grantland pieces: an oral history and a tongue-in-cheek analysis; an opinion piece juxtaposing Peter Berg‘s low-rated drama against “Glee”‘s success; and now even The Paris Review has thrown its hat into the ring. All of this, of course, comes on the heels of our own Sonya Chung‘s piece last April.
Misprint: Nabokov
Thanks Robin! Corrected.
Anthony Burgess accomplished that feat.
Beamish!
Well-read you are! I went off AB but 15 years ago I read (and owned) almost every novel (and a few books more) he’d written. Something in Earthly Powers irritated me and the spell was broken… and I must admit I never finished “Napoleon Symphony” (is that the book, or one of the books, you mean?), which was slyly… embarrassingly? dedicated to Kubrick. The problem with AB’s “musical writing” (that is, writing prose to mimic musical effects): you can’t really produce parallel constructions, for the reader, in Lit… there’s no polyphony. You have to make do with Gregorian chants!