April 2011
45 posts
“Hooray for Maxine Kumin! Truly, a trail-blazer; she was born before Anne Sexton,...”
– Sandra Beasley commenting on Maxine Kumin’s L.A. Times Book Prize win.
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Where I Live
is vertical: garden, pond, uphill pasture, run-in shed. Through pines, Pumpkin Ridge. Two switchbacks down church spire, spit of town. Where I climb I inspect the peas, cadets erect in lime-capped rows, hear hammer blows as pileateds peck the rot of shagbark hickories enlarging last year’s pterodactyl nests. Granite erratics humped like bears dot the outermost pasture where in tall grass ...
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“The punk scene was really small. It was like a secret society, and anyone fit in. It didn’t matter if you were a runaway or a graphic artist, or a woman, or a man or black or white. Nothing mattered except that if you knew you belonged there then everyone else knew you belonged there. To me that’s the pinnacle of cultural and social activity, to have a scene that’s just...
Canterbury Tweets
The Miller: A long day for the man, a rat in his maze. Now to the dispensary; I ache to blaze.
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The Courtship of The Miller and The Wife of Bath
Wife of Bath: There is more junk in these your speeches than I detect tucked in your breeches.
The Miller: You're a keen woman to spy well my junk. It you I would lend but your odor's of skunk.
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The Golden Eagle and John James Audubon
Today is John James Audubon’s birthday. Here’s a little slice of his life from Richard Conniff’s book, The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth. Conniff writes:
“When Audubon obtained a live Golden Eagle in 1833, he spent three days observing its behavior. In the field, Audubon could bring down a hundred birds a day without qualm, but...
St. Lionel’s third knuckle, for cheap will I sell it. Dude had thirty-nine fingers, as I told the apellate. #canterburytweets
-The Pardoner (aka Mary Roach)
Canterbury Tweets →
Our weeklong twitterfest to conjure the spirit of The Canterbury Tales has begun. Join in at #canterburytweets Things are already getting bawdy up in here.
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: April 25,...
“When April comes and with its showers sweet Has, to the root, pierced March’s drought complete, And then bathed every vein in such elixir That, by its strength, engendered is the flower;” The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation translated by Sheila Fisher
“The cover of How to Be a Super-Secretary, an informational pamphlet published by Remington...
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“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
– Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Billy Collins on Becoming the US Poet Laureate
“Becoming the United States Poet Laureate is a surprisingly straightforward process, especially considering the trumpeting resonance of the title. The news, however stunning, is delivered via a phone call from the Librarian of Congress, who congratulates you and talks you through a short list of duties, and after a pleasant luncheon in the Library’s pavilion weeks later—poof,...
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One Hundred Names for Love
After suffering a stroke Diane Ackerman’s husband, the writer Paul West, was afflicted with a loss of language, a condition known as aphasia. After unsuccessful attempts to regain his words using traditional speech therapy, Diane created her own program of word games to help Paul. She challenged him to come up with new pet names for her to replace all those names that had been lost after the...
“What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early...”
– Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (via libraryland)
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: April 18,...
“More and more of us are living better than ever before. In most of the world, an expectant mother can be reasonably confident that she will deliver a healthy baby, who will parent the next generation and live long enough to help educate the generation after that.” Earth: The Operators’ Manual by Richard B. Alley
“Were there ‘white’ people in antiquity?...
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Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.
From Abraham...
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Mythical Realism vs. Magical Realism
From The Millions interview with Alexi Zenter, author of Touch:
The Millions: There’s more that’s supernatural in Touch than the monsters. There are also golden caribou, a singing dog, and strange intrusions of the past into the present, and vice versa.
Alexi Zentner: With what I’m writing, I call it mythical realism instead of magical realism, because magical realism is so heavily identified...
“God knows nothing we don’t know.
We gave him every word he said.”
– Stephen Dunn, excerpted from the poem Knowledge
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The Animals of America (excerpt)
To make a new world the American animals know there must be sacrifices. Every evening a prayer is said for the spies who’ve volunteered to be petted in the houses of the enemy. “They are savages,” one reported, “let no one be fooled by their capacity for loving.”
Stephen Dunn, from Local Visitations
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“I admit I am basking in this amazing good news, pinching myself from time to...”
– Ann Hood, upon learning that Katherine Heigl is producing and starring in a movie of The Knitting Circle
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: April 11,...
“It might seem odd, even wrongheaded, to begin a book of criticism with a personal narrative. But I have a reason.” A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet by Eavan Boland
“I know it shouldn’t be done, but I’m tempted to start from the end.” Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld by Nicolai Lilin
“Two weeks before Labor Day,...
“Watching Spring trying to bust out in NYC is like listening to Kool Herc cut up...”
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“Reading Chandler and Highsmith and remembering that great literature is made...”
– Walter Kirn
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The Canterbury Tweets are Underway
The Canterbury Tweets is a modern reenactment of Chaucer’s tales of love, bawdy humor, and religious reckoning. The famed pilgrims and the subjects of their respective stories bring their oversized personalities to Twitter to share wisdom and dirty jokes in rhyming couplets. Fans and rabble-rousers alike, writing as characters doled out through W.W. Norton’s various social media...
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: April 4,...
“Trailing plastic tubes, Paul made his way across the room, steeped in twilight, and I was struck by how the body sometimes looks like the sea creature it is, a jellyfish with long tentacles, not really a fish at all but a gelatinous animal full of hidden symmetries, as well as lagoons and sewers, and lots of spongy and stringy bits.” One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage,...
“Our stories don’t fit on a newspaper page. I’m tired of newspaper...”
– Thomas Pletzinger, Funeral For A Dog
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“The lesson here is that a social cure needs to be accompanied by a plan to...”
– Tina Rosenberg
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Chicken
Why did she cross the road? She should have stayed in her little cage, shat upon by her sisters above her, shitting on her sisters below her.
God knows how she got out. God sees everything. God has his eye on the chicken, making her break like the convict headed for the river
who’s sloshing through the water to throw off the dogs, raising his arms to starlight to praise whatever...
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