At the Paris Review, Roxane Gay’s introduction to the The Selected Works of Audre Lorde is excerpted, a tribute to Audre Lorde’s defining contribution to contemporary feminism. “Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity,” Gay writes. “She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, ‘the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.'”
Roxane Gay on How Audre Lorde Honored the Lived Realities of Women
Very Short Film Contest
UK students have until December 31, 2012 to record a 60-second Very Short Film on any topic of their choosing so long as it can “fire up an audience’s curiosity.” The winner will earn £9,000 (~$14,465.70) for their education, and top submissions will be featured on the Guardian website.
“A man who kept to himself”
Recommended reading: one essay on George Orwell‘s stomping grounds on the Scottish island where he wrote 1984 in the throes of a tubercular fever, and another on the tiny Indian town of Motihari where he was born.
I Know That Naked Man
Recommended Reading: The untold story of a legendary photograph by Diane Arbus, A naked man being a woman, over at The Literary Hub.
The New Yorker on The Late American Novel
The folks at The New Yorker’s Book Bench offer their take at The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. (Spoiler Alert: Katherine Hepburn gets a shoutout.)
Just let it be weird.
Mark Mann on going to the gallery and looking at art: “The fact is, nobody knows what art is or why people make it. This is blatantly disturbing.”
Unhappy Writers Are Unhappy in Their Own Ways
“They found, unsurprisingly, that blocked writers were unhappy. Symptoms of depression and anxiety, including increased self-criticism and reduced excitement and pride at work, were elevated in the blocked group; symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as repetition, self-doubt, procrastination, and perfectionism, also appeared, as did feelings of helplessness and ‘aversion to solitude’—a major problem, since writing usually requires time alone.” On the causes of writer’s block.