For my last post of the year, here’s a look back at ten of my favorite literary tidbits from Mix Tape 2011—the sublime, the ridiculous, and a few things not easily classified as either.
Plausible-Seeming But Tonally Inappropriate Book Covers, along with plausible-seeming but tonally inappropriate praise from Jonathan Franzen.
DO NOT friend the famous poet on Facebook.
Kerouac never had GPS! In fact, “the mode of travel on the rise today is antithetical to the mode found in On the Road and its predecessors.”
Here’s a taste from Salon’s first installment in a series of articles on the “hollowing out” of the so-called creative class: “for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level—the working- or middle-classes within the creative class—things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold.
Wearing your heart—or someone else’s—on your heavily discounted sleeve.
If your house is stuffed with books, you might want to think about how they got there. The working conditions were so intolerable at one Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, EMTs were stationed outside.
Watch—perhaps in wonder, perhaps in horror—as a twenty-first-century baby interacts with printed material.
Which do you prefer, the project book or the mix-tape book? Poet Erica Meitner looks at the pros and cons of each.
Why do writers and other artists keep plugging away in this economy? As Lewis Hyde explains, “The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Check out Paul Muldoon’s close reading of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.”