Picking up where last week’s Shakespeare obsession left off, check out some lines from Sonnet 76:
““Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed“”
Anthropologists are attempting to exhume the Bard to see, among other things, what “noted weed” and “compounds strange” might be and, put plainly, if he was a cannabis user.
A cacophony of voices on the subject of experimental literature over at HTMLGIANT: Eileen Myles, Johannes G??ransson, and Sesshu Foster.
Sound bite from G??ransson: “The phrase ???experimental writing’ is really broad. A lot of times it’s used to define writing that is not ???mainstream’ or ???Traditional.’ The ???mainstream’ poetry (and fiction) seems mainly to be a style developed in the 1970s as part of the MFA workshop pedagogy ??? one based largely on restraint (one must ???earn the image,’ must not be excessive). It’s a very very narrow category of writing. “So it’s a very confusing term, and it reinforces this binary, which I think it may be inherently conservative.”
Over at n+1, Elizabeth Gumport performs an autopsy on the art of the book review. And swipes at Gary Shteyngart.
Taking a break from stirring up controversy, Anis Shivani offers some thoughts on the place and purpose of criticism, and how he can be published in the Threepenny Review and Iowa Review and still rail against “the system.”
From a sharply satirical pamphlet entitled The Executive Coloring Book, circa 1961: “THIS IS ME. I am an executive. Executives are important. They go to important offices and do important things. Color my underwear important.”
Philosopher Slavoj ??i??ek on social priorities: “Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?”
The good folks at Scarriet remind us that over the course of his career critic William Logan has had a few choice words (not necessarily those choice words) and an unrepentant attitude for many of today’s poetry heavyweights.