PIXMAVEN - The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator

Feeling inarticulate? Critically gauche? Or just verbally impotent? We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy “insights.”

Related longread: Alix Rule & David Levine’s “International Art English,” on the peculiar and pervasive meaninglessness of fine art criticism in Triple Canopy. The take away being, of course, that sometimes art is stupefying but the language used to describe it shouldn’t be.

“Isn’t it pretty to tweet so?”

Good ol’ Hem, in minds all over the world.

lareviewofbooks:

    
     A journalist makes nice with Papa Hem, via Tahrir Square and Old Havana

Hemingway wrote a few good books before he became a cartoon, and I own a couple of them. I stole my copy of The Sun Also Rises from my father, which he got during his school days. It’s the Scribner’s printing from 1954, hardbound and dark blue. I’ve always liked the way it feels in my hands, but not always the writing. The preening masculinity, the anti-Semitism. Hemingway’s postured simplicity.

None of it seems like something you’d want to keep alive, at least for a reader from my generation, but here he is anyway. 113 years after his birth, Hemingway’s legacy continues to survive by continuing to change, by which I mean we continue to find different things we want from him.

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emilybooks: “With so much focus in our world on what young female sexuality ideally looks like, it’s a relief to see this portrait of what young female sexuality honestly feels like. Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault. It’s a thrilling, enlightening and really hot place to be.” — Sheila Heti Buy Maidenhead now!  See Tamara (plus Emily Carter and Ariana Reines) read next week!  Oh look, Maidenhead’s over at Emily Books. Sheila Heti and Tamara Faith Berger read with Chris Kraus in Toronto, and the super fun and very sexy event was covered in one of our #LitBeats earlier this year.
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emilybooks:

“With so much focus in our world on what young female sexuality ideally looks like, it’s a relief to see this portrait of what young female sexuality honestly feels like. Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault. It’s a thrilling, enlightening and really hot place to be.” — Sheila Heti

Buy Maidenhead now!  See Tamara (plus Emily Carter and Ariana Reines) read next week! 

Oh look, Maidenhead’s over at Emily Books.

Sheila Heti and Tamara Faith Berger read with Chris Kraus in Toronto, and the super fun and very sexy event was covered in one of our #LitBeats earlier this year.

(via emilygould)

Source: emilybooks

We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of. The story is the thing; the physical book or ereader or tablet or phone is merely the delivery device. When you fetishize the physical properties of an object, you devalue its contents. When you freak out over the ‘destruction’ of books, you are not elevating books. You are reducing the intangible magic of stories to the ink, pulp, and glue that deliver them to you.
Books Are Not Sacred Objects  (via bookriot)

(via bookriot)

Where Fitzgerald casts feeling across the brow of novelistic self-consciousness, Wallace revels in oiling and refashioning the squeaky wheel of novel-ness, to arrive at what the enterprise represents at its core, the entire literary lineage. The lit marathon tempts a similarly immense question by bringing the reader out of seclusion. Of the way it wraps around us, exhausts our capacity to pay attention while also abiding our coming and goings — we can drop in, drop out, and when we get back, chances are good it will still be there — the poet Susan Terris, echoing Tillman, reflects, “I guess the singular joy of the marathon reading is being read aloud to, which most of us love — exactly in the same way we did when we were children.

The Millions : Miles to Go: Notes on Marathon Reading

A great piece on marathon readings by Jeff Price; honored to have our DFW readathon included.

(via wordbrooklyn)

(via wordbrooklyn)

picadorbookroom:

This post is part of an week-long mini-series celebrating National Short Story Month, continuing with The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

It’s difficult to think how very many people now know who Deborah Eisenberg is from a cameo appearance last month on Gossip Girl, but have likely never read one of her stories. Their souls are poorer for it.

Deborah Eisenberg is in a very small group of artists whose work does things that no one else’s does. She writes short stories—only short stories—and when we collected all 27 of them (written over a 30 year period) in one volume in 2010 it was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Her stories are quite long, often 25-40 pages, and in them she packs all the characters and incident of an entire novel. One is half-tempted to ask: who needs novels with short stories like these?

One of my favorites is “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” and its opening is one of my favorite paragraphs in literature:

“I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I’d poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away.”