Arts & Culture

King Lear on the Mean Streets of Twitter, and more

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Excerpts and curios from around the web:

King Lear on the mean streets of Twitter, a case for simulated reality run by our far-off future ancestors, and some revelations on the burial sites of Cervantes and Aristotle. Plus: Rebecca Schiff on the political inconsistencies between an author and her characters: “If you’re tapping into something emotional—even if you’re really left-wing, like I am—you might wind up finding a conservative streak in you. And, as a fiction writer, if I feel like if that’s an important part of the character, I need to let that out, even if it’s not what I ‘officially’ believe.”

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The Unbearable Newness of Staying

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It can be hard, coming out of a three-year MFA program, to look around and realize it was all temporary. Even as I’ve decided to commit to Ann Arbor for one more year, to the apartment I’ve been in for two years, to teaching at the university that bequeathed me my degree, all around me my people are deciding to leave. I don’t feel left behind so much as I feel that my landscape is evaporating, the Ann Arbor I’d signed up for no longer the Ann Arbor that remains.

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Literary Hate Mail, Sex with Shakespeare, and more

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Excerpts and curios from around the web:

The enduring art of literary hate mail, Shakespeare as a springboard for spanking, some thoughts on why giving up writing might not be wrong, and Lydia Davis on why we should read translated works. Plus: Vinson Cunningham on what qualities make an essay uniquely American: “As much as one might wish to lay claim to the sensibility of, say, Montaigne—the ruminative philosopher’s ideal, the notion of the essay as neutral attempt—most of us Americans are Emersons: artful sermonizers, pathological point-makers, turntablists spinning the hits with future mischief in mind.”

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Lolo the Donkey and the Avant-Garde That Never Was: Part 3

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Monkeys don’t usually have access to cameras, but it’s an extreme case that reminds us of a larger point: animals create objects, images, gestures, songs, and architecture all the time. Whether we label these activities as art is both a semantic and theoretical choice. One thinker arguing that non-human creativity should be included in our definition of art is curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. She asserts that the field of contemporary art is historically determined and far from universal. People imagine that the way they live–and the broad systems that organize their society–are the best, despite the fact that these things are always changing. History never ends, but we’re constantly fooled into thinking that everything has led up to the current moment with some kind of purpose or finitude.

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Jenny Diski is Getting On With It

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Diski’s essays on death hold these things together brilliantly, somehow even beautifully. Her writing, which weaves without warning between a methodical, detailed account of treatment and the daily life of the dying and more ethereal, abstract passages, suggests the experience of losing lucidity and finding it again that a drugged body undergoes. It is to the LRB’s credit that they let Diski, who has been writing regularly for the publication since 1992, do whatever she damn well pleased. And in this way, Diski transcends her clinical status as body-cum-puzzle-piece to be wedged in a machine; she is throughout an active observer and writing subject, who tells us on the other side of chemo that, “the entire process makes me think of clubbing baby seals.”

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Manly Beauty–The True Ambition, and more

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Excerpts and curios from around the web:

Walt Whitman’s guide to health and better living, the grudge narratives of LIGO scientists, and Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poetry. Plus: Hulu adapts The Handmaid’s Tale for the small screen, and Catherine Nichols explores the character adaptability that makes a novel addictive: “The adaptation technique isn’t just an efficient way of telegraphing psychological depth; it hits the reader like rock n’ roll.”

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Narrative Power: On the Writings of Robert Caro

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Caro’s writing is linked to a deep moral obligation to get the story right, not just as an unassailable set of facts, but as something more democratic, as strange as that might be to say about a set of giant books about the elites of the country. His books are ultimately about power. But as Maggie Nelson said during a recent talk at the AWP writing conference, “Every book invokes its own ghost,” and around a book about power lingers the ghosts of the powerless. Caro knows this. He says, “Somewhere in The Power Broker I write that regard for power means disregard for those without power. I mean, we’re really talking about justice and injustice.”

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How Do You Recommend a Favorite Book?

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I had forgotten that I was allowed to talk about my feelings when recommending a book. Not just allowed, but encouraged. Not that I wasn’t “allowed” to talk about how a book made me feel when surrounded by other writers or students; it just seemed that one’s feelings were beside the point. Yes, yes, this book made you feel happy, the characters made you feel like you knew them, but why did it make you feel that way? My further education was always trying to break me out of this mold of feeling without thinking.

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Automaton Lit, Clever Macaques, and more

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Excerpts and curios from around the web:

The literature of mechanical life, debunking “the ladder of nature,” the legacy of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and more. Plus: A look at Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies in relation to the current election cycle: “Trump may look like a rancid creampuff in a Brioni suit, but his crass language serves the function of a ripped physique in a ripped T-shirt, projecting a Stanley Kowalskian virility.”

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At the Piano: Remembering Lorraine Geller and Portland’s Jazz History

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Recorded in Los Angeles in 1954, At the Piano came out in 1959, a year after Lorraine died. Jazz trios are a dime a dozen, and piano trio albums can sound so much alike that they seem interchangeable. The worst have too many standards. Too little fire. Not enough swing. They can sound stiff, safe, almost classical in their polish. Lorraine’s, though, brims with life.

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