October is National Arts and Humanities month, and at USA Today, poet Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how art is essential to addressing the most pressing issues of our time. “Salvation is not a word to be used lightly given the crises we face,” Alexander writes. “But even as we come together to address them—through civic engagement, through work toward racial justice, through the development of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs—I believe that it is the arts and humanities that can save us: the essential us, the who-we-are-as-human-beings us.”
Elizabeth Alexander Turns to the Arts to Save Us
Inseparable
Male bonding can take many forms, among them the rarely-seen joint book tour, which Mike Harvkey and Josh Weil decided to undertake in support of their new novels. The two write about meeting each other, travelling around America and bouncing ideas off trusted friends in a Salon essay. FYI, our own Bill Morris wrote a piece about his own book tour for The Daily Beast.
Tenure Track
“One hears, in the news, that one new fad after another is sweeping the academy. World literature, digital humanities, book history, cognitive science. Perhaps everyone will just watch TV (there are twenty-seven panels on The Wire, and at least a paper, I recall, on Rizzoli and Isles, a TNT show)…The elephant in the room, or the one that has left the room a while ago (but whose stinking presence everyone still inhales deeply or holds their nose after), is Theory.” N + 1 reviews MLA 2013.
There’s always funny in the banana stand.
Rolling Stone asked David Cross about Arrested Development‘s Netflix relaunch and he says it’s “audacious and amazing.“
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With A Grain of Salt
Charles Baxter doesn’t believe in writing routines, but he does have some odd superstitions. “I don’t like to spill salt. I throw it over my left shoulder. But if I spill salt in the morning, my day is fucked,” he told The Daily Beast.
Compressed Madness
In a conversation from Upstairs at the Strand, Year in Reading alumnus Junot Díaz and Hilton Als discuss masculinity, science fiction, realism and truth, and representations of Latino culture. Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions interview with Díaz.
Charles Yu on Switching Between TV and Novel Writing
Charles Yu discusses the novelistic techniques he employs in his television writing and, conversely, how his TV projects influence his fiction.
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Emily Dickinson, Harvard-Bound
Seth Perlow examines how Harvard claims the rights to Emily Dickinson's poems, a body of work that was unpublished when she died, more than 130 years ago.
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