My boyfriend isn’t really my boyfriend; he and I aren’t quite living together. We came to a silent agreement where more often than not, I am around. My things are still at my house—four bedrooms, three baths—with my husband. I visit my things, my husband, often. I run my fingers over the modern statue near the front entrance, the dimple in my husband’s chin, the thick, ropy muscles of his shoulders, the mahogany mantle over the fireplace. I belong with these things, they are mine, so I do not stay long.
Source: joylandmagazine.com
“Martha Gellhorn’s pen pals included Eleanor Roosevelt, Maxwell Perkins, H.G. Wells, her husband (later, ex-) Ernest Hemingway, and Peggy Schutze, my maternal grandmother.”
- A Goofy State of Mind: My Grandmother’s Letters from Martha Gellhorn by Amy Shearn
Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.
If you’re looking for a weekend #longread, Robert Moor has an interesting article in n+1 on the history of digital and hypertextual literature.
Plus, the article begins with a nice summary of The Late American Novel, a collection of writing on the future of the book edited by our own founding editor, C. Max Magee.
Source: nplusonemag.com
“I guess this is to say that the symposium had its share of characters one might expect to find in a David Foster Wallace novel.”
— Out of Reach: Notes from the David Foster Wallace Symposium by A-J Aronstein
With the close of the post-Bolaño decade, it seems that the tide of the author’s original works is finally ebbing. New Direction’s latest release, much to my delight and that of other genre boundary-watchers, is The Secret of Evil, a thin collection of fictions that occasionally read as essays. Or is it the other way around?
![“Readers have a perfect right to regard Philip Larkin, as I do not, as a complete shit. But if they consider his personal failings indistinguishable from his poetry, I think the loss is theirs.”
-Stephen Akey disentangles Larkin’s wonderful poetry from the (at times) unsavory poet lurking behind it in “The Poetry of Mental Unhealth: Philip Larkin”
[Image source Telegraph.uk]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3gag3rC9j1r6xvfko1_500.jpg)
“Readers have a perfect right to regard Philip Larkin, as I do not, as a complete shit. But if they consider his personal failings indistinguishable from his poetry, I think the loss is theirs.”
-Stephen Akey disentangles Larkin’s wonderful poetry from the (at times) unsavory poet lurking behind it in “The Poetry of Mental Unhealth: Philip Larkin”
[Image source Telegraph.uk]
“If my father could not directly invite me to connect with him, he could find more oblique ways to bring the two of us together: he could give me reference books as gifts, bribe me to open the books he collected.”
- Reference Point: Fathers and Sons by Joseph M. Schuster
“That eReader, then, accounts for an initial carbon footprint 200-250% greater than your typical household library, and it increases every time you get a new eReader for Christmas, or every time the latest Apple Keynote lights a fire in your wallet.”
- Are eReaders Really Green? by Nick Moran
“Still, even at 81, sporting both a new novel and a new hip, Morrison is as grand as she’s ever been. When we meet in her many-gabled house in the aptly named village of Grand View-on-Hudson, about 25 miles north of Manhattan, that bountiful woolen hair matches the lower half of a soft, enveloping sweater. Her face is polished in places and fissured in others, like the weathered stone of Mount Rushmore: the first black woman Nobelist, who’s lived long enough to speak to the first black president. Born only two years after Martin Luther King Jr., she’s a great-grandmother of assimilation—and she looks the part.”
- Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison? by Boris Kachka
