“Skim the table of contents of the major literary journals, … and even general-interest weeklies with vast reach such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Scan the recipients of the prestigious and sometimes lucrative fellowships, awards, and lectureships … The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. … These outsiders find themselves, at the very start of their careers, on the inside — and not just of a hermetic realm of poetry … At literary festivals, many of these poets are drawing big crowds.”
Blog
Guldoza live at WOMEX 2016
Uzbek song is not well known here (even the pop music is obscure), but it is well worth investigating. Here’s a sample from the singer Gulzoda, recorded at the WOMEX festival in Santiago de Compostela.
The Old Catchup Game: Daan Kleijn And Charles Lloyd Reviewed
Daan Kleijn, Passages, (daankleijn)
Charles Lloyd And The Marvels + Lucinda Williams, Vanished Gardens (Blue Note)
How Tate Gallery Revitalized Liverpool
“Coming from the Left, my idea of economic regeneration was to do with factories and shipyards – the idea that art could be an economic driver didn’t figure for me. But, looking back, that was out of date. I would never have guessed that tourism, looking at things and shopping could have become economic drivers, but they have. In some parts of Liverpool, you are more likely to hear Spanish than Scouse.”
How Susan Sontag Staged ‘Waiting For Godot’ In War-Torn Sarajevo
Twenty-five years ago this Friday, Sontag’s production of Beckett’s play premiered in the besieged, hungry, surrounded-by-snipers Bosnian capital. Two actors who participated and a local journalist who was there recall how it happened.
Excitable: The Age Of The Rampant Exclamation Point!
Are we doomed to live in a world where every sentence will need to have a minimum of three exclamation points in order to be read as anything less than outright hostile?
What’s The Most Important Idea Ever To Come From India? Nothing
Which is to say, zero. “The invention of the zero was a hugely significant mathematical development, one that is fundamental to calculus, which made physics, engineering and much of modern technology possible. But what was it about Indian culture that gave rise to this creation that’s so important to … the modern world?”
Solving The Book Storage Problem
In recent years, there’s been a rejection of the stodgy old alphabet in favor of organizational principles driven by color, size and genre. I blame online shopping. Aesthetics in literature are important, but literature as aesthetics makes me nervous. When did a candle-topped pyramid of paperbacks become a symbol of depth? If you line up your novels in rainbow order but don’t Instagram them, were they ever really there?
A ‘Spotify For Cookbooks’ Is Coming
“Like Spotify, for a fixed monthly fee ($8.99 in the U.S.), users can browse CKBK’s collection of more than 500 cookbooks and 100,000 recipes, which [co-founder Matthew] Cockerill said was just a starting point. ‘We have a huge pipeline of content that we will add to the service as it grows,’ he said.”
Is Luck Just A Subjective Judgment?
Pick up any newspaper and you’ll find stories – survivors of terrible plane or automobile crashes, or patients with dread diseases who live past their predicted expiration date. Invariably they are described as hugely lucky. That’s puzzling on the face of it; you’d think that somebody really lucky wouldn’t have got cancer or been in a terrible wreck to start with. Such cases raise interesting questions about the nature of luck. Is it something real or is it purely subjective, just a matter of how we happen to feel about the things that happen?