For the Paris Review, Marie Mutsuki Mockett reflects on Bashō’s haikus through the eyes of her 10-year-old son, who encounters the poet’s work for the first time in the midst of home quarantine. “All poetry requires interpretation, but it is a characteristic of Bashō’s haiku that the reader plays a role in fully constructing the poem,” Mockett writes. “It’s as though Basho has left out a step somewhere in a math equation, and you must make the mental effort to do that step for the answer to reveal itself. This kind of cooperative art feels relevant right now, in a time when we are all staying home as much for ourselves as for each other.”
Marie Mutsuki Mockett Interprets Bashō with Her Son
Good Grief!
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and now is as good a time as any to revisit R. Sikoryak’s Good ol’ Gregor Brown. Our own Matt Seidel’s essay on The Metamorphosis is perfect for those craving more Kafka.
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The Art of Stealing
Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
A Monument to Suffering and Courage
Everyone is talking about Nobel Prize winning Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Allow Jonathon Sturgeon at Flavorwire to explain why he believes Alexievich’s victory is a step in the right direction for the Prize.
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Uber Nichts
George Bernard Shaw had a strange relationship with Nietzsche. Alternately envious and dismissive of the German philosopher, Shaw once said he wanted to be an intellectual in Nietzsche’s mold, though he also felt Nietzsche’s thinking was addled and self-absorbed. In an essay for The New Statesman, Michael Holroyd tries to make sense of Shaw’s views.
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