A defense of the virtues of an art that’s seemingly more and more lost each year: memorization and declamation.
William Gibson, on science fiction authors’ hankering for the way things were: “Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what’s going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better. It’s an ancient, somewhat universal human attitude, and often they give it full voice. But it’s been being given voice for thousands and thousands of years. You can go back and see the ancient Greeks doing it. You know, ‘All that is good is gone. These young people are incapable of making art, or blue jeans, or whatever.’ It’s just an ancient thing, and it’s so ancient that I’m inclined to think it’s never actually true. And I’ve always been deeply, deeply distrustful of anybody’s ‘golden age’—that one in which we no longer live.”
When stockbrokers and CEOs find Wall Street ticker symbols in short supply, some necessary wordsmithing ensues.
(image of the 1941 first draft of Langston Hughes’s poem “Ballad of Booker T.” via The Library of Congress)
In China, poetry is being cited as a direct, and very real, “subversion of state power” in a new prosecution case against the founder of the China Democracy Party, a man who spent seven years in jail for the latter action.
In “creative nonfiction,” where does the obligation to tell a good story outweigh the obligation to adhere to the facts—or vice versa? John D’Agata and Jim Fingal discuss.
Roberto Bolaño, when asked if he had “shed one tear” about his critics: “Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.”
It’s been a sad past few weeks; Wisława Szymborska, Dorothea Tanning, Ben Gazzara, Stacy Doris, and a handful of more artists passed away, raising the question of how—if at all—we can grieve for people we’ve never met.
February 2nd was James Joyce’s birthday; here’s a page of text that later became part of Ulysses. Note the difference between it and the published version.
There’s a reason you might have found that Super Bowl ad for Chrysler noteworthy, and not just because it included Clint Eastwood—turns out poet Matthew Dickman loaned his talents to the script.