Literary & Media Indulgences - 11/10/2012

-- Pulitzer-winning fiction writer Marilynne Robinson (who you know I love so much) and astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser are interviewed together about the cosmos, mystery, and the dangers of pieties.

-- And you know what? The "On Being" interview with Rilke translator and philosopher of ecology Joanna Macy is really worth another listen or three. (Its cover image is above.)

-- "The discord between a desire for stability and the very real possibility of destruction is intractable." Ingrid Norton writes of hurricanes in life and literature, and "this fragile, suspended mood," for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- The longform guide to climate change.

-- This is how Philip Pullman has reimagined the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Related: Marina Warner (wonderful) talks fairy tales and the art of "retelling" with The Rumpus.

-- A sneak preview of Symbolia, the new magazine of illustrated journalism! Hurray!

-- "I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?" Poet Mary Oliver, interviewed on NPR.

-- "Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic." From the diaries of George Orwell.

-- Tim Parks, who I persist in considering must-read, on the internationalization of both sports and literature.

-- Roxane Gay edits Guernica's erotic fiction issue. She picked six stories that, Gay writes, examine "desire in an original, unexpected way. These writers rise above categories. They walk carefully along that fine line between the erotic and the explicit and do so with grace and intelligence."

-- "I have learnt to balance my own books, because the ones I write are dependent on the person I am." Jeanette Winterson on money and its lack. (via The Literary Saloon)

-- Louise Erdrich writes about "voting in Little Earth" -- that is, Election Day among Native Americans in Minnesota.

-- Why Charles Darwin got 4,000 votes in Georgia.

-- The formidable Adam Hochschild reviews Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's new memoir, Of Africa (which has been overshadowed this fall by Chinua Achebe's memoir, which Dayo Olopade writes about in The New Republic.) Hochschild's review includes lines like this: "Among the Africans who deserve some kind of secular sainthood is Wole So­yinka" and "His commitment to freedom has always been absolute." But praise for the man does not parallel praise for the book ...

-- Okey Ndibe on Achebe's "would-be critics."

-- An astonishing data visualization of women as academic authors over four centuries (1665-2010).

-- What admirers of Eleanor Roosevelt do, fifty years after her death.

-- "How Sioux Falls marked the death of George McGovern."

-- What happened when Truman Capote set out to profile Marlon Brando in 1957.

-- Matthew Specktor interviews Paris Review editor Lorin Stein in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A brief history of sports, told through political cartoons.

-- Eight leading female photographers choose their favorite portraits of women for the Telegraph.

-- The historical fakery of photography, via the New York Review of Books.

-- The University of Michigan is now home to the world's largest Orson Welles archive.

-- Dwell has a map of independent bookstores in America -- and you can add your own favorites. Related: Melville House talks shop with Porter Square Books.

-- On the art and history of note-taking.

-- "I am perpetually reading the culture." A.M. Homes writes in the New Statesman about growing up in 1960s Washington, D.C.

-- The new Granta features Brazil's best young novelists.

-- Tanya Paperny writes on the deep loss of Micheal Henry Heim, and why we still need activists for literary translation.

-- How to translate humor.

-- What Detroit needs is more letterpress printing shops.

-- "Flint artists here want to make a living."

-- Write or Die. (via Jacob C.)

-- "It's not the load that breaks you down; it's the way you carry it."

-- My dear friend Matt Erickson has an essay in PowerPlay that is by turns hilarious and provoking on "Freedom Watchers: Schools and Literary Fetishism in the Age of the Digital Native" (PDF).

-- After all the drama this summer, the University of Virginia has voted to extend President Teresa Sullivan's contract through 2016.

-- Fact-checking at The New Yorker.

-- "In 1967, an ambitious young reporter broke a promise to a troubled source and inadvertently made her famous. Forty-three years later, he set out to find her and apologize." The tagline on the original 1967 Newsweek cover story was "Trouble in Hippieland."

-- Dave Hickey is really, really angry about modern art. And he has good reason to be.

-- The Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam makes its entire 125,000-piece collection digitally available to all of us.

-- Problems with the phrase "corrective rape."

-- Somali poet and comic playwright Warsame Shire Awale has been murdered.

-- When the couplet caught fire: Eavan Boland reviews the new book of Adrienne Rich's new and selected poems.

-- Walt Whitman, Soren Kierkegaard,  and Johnny Rotten are all mentioned in a single sentence here in Justin Bigos' interview with poet Matt Hart for the American Literary Review. 

-- Sonia Manzano -- you likely remember as Maria on "Sesame Street" -- writes about revolution for children. (Related, from The Millions: "Big Bird in History: Why We Fund PBS.")

-- In defense of literary excess.

-- On the animal appeal of the human voice.