Some may be surprised to hear this position. After all, I harangued writers for over-relying on the small-talk topic of “What have you been reading?” Hopefully, this contradiction goes away by the end of my defense.
In Defense of Small Talk Read More »
Since Tomaž Šalamun’s death at the end of last year, I have been living with his poetry, walking around with it, running my hands back and forth across its lines, coming to find in its voice a friend, even though I never took a class with him, never spoke a word to him, and hardly even know about his life. He is the kind of poet who has this effect. Many tributes were erected when he passed. André Naffis-Sahely wrote a moving obituary at The Paris Review, in which he follows Šalamun’s poetry along its “tightrope between ecstasy and despair, the rational and the irrational, the sublime and the horrible.”
Tomaž Šalamun: A Love List of Lines Read More »
“It took me ten years to figure out how to write funny the way I could talk funny. Doing improv or standup or making people laugh at a party or an open-mic night—that kind of humor came naturally to me, but writing funny was so hard. I struggled with that balance between seriousness and silliness—I didn’t want to write myself into a corner, where I could only be silly or lighthearted. I felt like there had to be a way to have a legitimate mind and still make readers laugh, to say earnestly true things, and not just ironically true things.”
On “The World’s Largest Man”: An Interview with Harrison Scott Key Read More »
In one of the last visual narratives to grace the pages of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here, a woman in 1957 is depicted walking across a room over the course of several spreads. Her walk is juxtaposed with and transposed over fragments of other scenes from years ranging from 1620 to 2005, scenes that—through their shared space on the page—take place both throughout the prism of the past and also simultaneously in a static present. The woman walks across the room until she reaches for a book and, in the novel’s final frame, states, “…Now I remember.” Readers can only make sense of this phrase by returning to the book’s beginning, where the first line reads: “Now why did I come in here again?”
The Spectral and the Speculative in Richard McGuire’s “Here” Read More »
Since my last post, I’ve said goodbye to my twenties. One minute I was a flower opening, the next I’m not allowed to carry a children’s lunch pail or purchase fake Uggs anymore. I’m reluctant to buy into the notion that thirty is the age when you should become the person you’ll be until you die, and the age at which you should stop wearing glitter. But if the rest of the world expects age to herald change, there are a few habits I’d like to tilt toward or away from in the writing department–and not because my youthful metabolism will soon grind to a halt.
Advice to My 30-Year-Old Self from My 30-Year-Old Self Read More »
In the early morning hours of July 6, 1996, 19-year-old Dawn Sprunger was driving home from a friend’s house when she spotted an unidentified flying object hovering above her in the sky. “It looked like a vertical jet,” she later told reporters, “triangular in shape. At certain times you could see red and blue lights in it.” Sprunger remained calm and drove home, though once inside, peeked out the window to find that the aircraft had apparently followed her. She woke her parents, who upon witnessing the red and blue lights themselves, quickly called the authorities. By sighting’s end witnesses would include several police officers, the police chief, as well as the mayor of Berne, Indiana, who, fine public servant that he was, even managed to record a bit of video footage of the encounter.
Unsolved Histories: A U.F.O., a Crop Circle, and a Message Not Yet Received Read More »
Reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction side-by-side makes for a fun, challenging experience: figuring out how Mueenuddin’s prose violates stylistic conventions and gets away with it. In fact, Gardner’s (and other grammarians’) prescribed sentence constructions often lead to clumsy iterations.
Daniyal Mueenuddin and the Art of Fiction Read More »
“It feels impossible to talk about race or other kinds of difference,” wrote Roxane Gay recently in the New York Times Sunday Review. “But if we don’t have difficult conversations, we will be able to reconcile neither this country’s racist past nor racist present.” This is a refrain we read and hear so often these days, and yet, the conversations remain hard in coming. Faheem Majeed, in his first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago this year, is a notable example of conversation between artist, curator, and museum institution that seeks to expand that conversation with a wider viewing public.
Majeed Cares: On Giving a Damn Read More »
Dear Cora, I sat down to read this evening, but somehow my thoughts kept wandering to you, and I’ve put up my book to talk to you. I feel so queer tonight, as if something was going to happen. It’s been coming on all this afternoon. Now to make it perfect I spose that some calamity should occur. But you know I’m not very superstitious.
“I’ve written four books about Britain since the ’50s, and pop culture always played a big part in those books. So they were always sort of very broad, panoramic political and cultural histories. And I always thought it was a really interesting topic: how Britain went from being a country that really prided itself on its economic and imperial dominance to one that had reinvented itself as a kind of cultural power. So, the fact that I do television informed the book to some extent, as well as the work I’ve done for the newspapers. I’d say it’s made me very conscious of how historians like me write a lot about politics but the reality is that for most people, politics doesn’t play a very important role in their lives, whereas pop culture does. TV is part of our common currency in a way that politics just isn’t. I thought this would be a good way to explore Britain’s national experience in the last century or so, as well is how Britain has been perceived.”
On “The Great British Dream Factory”: An Interview With Dominic Sandbrook Read More »
