At the Creative Independent, Sabrina Orah Mark shares how her writing style evolved over the years, and how the blurring of poetry and prose gave her freedom to explore. “I think when I started writing prose poems,” Mark says, “that was when I felt like I could have the real and the unreal live inside of a little box together. Charles Simic talks about the prose poem as being this impossible form. It’s the coming together of prose and poetry and it shouldn’t exist, but it does. And finding that form allows for this marvel, for the impossible to live inside of a space. And that was really how I accessed that aesthetic or mindset or dream I was always after.”
In Search of the Impossible with Sabrina Orah Mark
Wes Being Wes
From the looks of the promotional poster and the theatrical trailer, Wes Anderson may have “out-Wes Anderson’d” himself with his new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
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Hemingway Double Shot
Got a couple thousand bucks lying around? You can place a bid on one of Ernest Hemingway’s love letters. Or, for a more modest price of “free,” you can read Tim Weed’s rumination entitled “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana.”
Not Very Titillating
Those of you who know the joy of reading romance novels with your friends have probably wondered at some point what people who write erotica are like. Are they bankers and professionals? Housewives and mistresses? Are they some combination of all of the above? At Slate, a chaste look at the lives of unchaste writers.
Talk About That
“Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.” On Freud.
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Conferenceness
“Can a conference really transcend its essential conferenceness?” For a conference on Geoff Dyer, that’s the essential question, and the Los Angeles Review of Books has an answer. Pair with Dyer’s Year in Reading and Janet Potter‘s review of Another Great Day at Sea.
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Medium Vice
Year in Reading alum Maud Newton has a new short story up on Medium. Titled “Nobody’s Stranger,” the “Miami noir love story” somewhat wonderfully features a bar, “the most incongruous bar in Little Haiti,” in which the patrons are mostly “aging emo kids and British soccer fans and overweight burlesque enthusiasts.”
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