Literary & Media Indulgences - 12/7/2012

-- Let's listen for Madeleine L'Engle. Even more echo is heard here.

-- "The real and unreal: Ursula K. Le Guin, American novelist."

-- I'm five kinds of excited for the debut of Symbolia, a new digital magazine of comics journalism helmed by the talented Erin Polgreen. "... incendiary storytelling from around the world. We’re merging longform journalism and sequential art ..." Yes, please! See also an extensive profile of Symbolia in the Columbia Journalism Review (illustrated, naturally) and listen to Erin talk Symbolia on WBEZ.

-- "Young Latino Students Don't See Themselves in Books."

-- "We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood." Bookforum talks with fiction writer Lydia Millet.

-- Zoe Heller is swiftly becoming one of my favorite literary critics. Here she is on Salman Rushdie's new book about his life as Joseph Anton, in hiding after the fatwa pronounced upon him for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

-- Kwani Litfest kicks off this weekend in Nairobi, themed Conversations With The Horn: Writers, Artists In Exchange. It's bringing together Somali poet Hadraawi, Sudanese-English novelist Jamal Mahjoub, Eritrean writer/historian Alemseged Tesfai, Egyptian writer/activist Nawal El Sadaawi, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, and Ghanian novelist Kojo Laing, among others. I utterly wish I were there. Friends in Kenya, tell me all about it.

-- Cultivating Bulgaria into a dynamic and world-renowned literary center. Novelist Elizabeth Kostova is doing some very interesting work.

-- “What happens when everyone is a poet?”

-- "I feel like I have to earn my breakfast." Jane Fine interviews A.M. Homes for BOMB Magazine.

-- Remembering the Montreal massacre: The 1989 mass killing targeting female engineering students has been memorialized in ways that have scrubbed the atrocity from its political repercussions. The 25-year-old man who shot the students screamed: "You're all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!"

-- U.S. state science standards are "mediocre to awful," according to a new report.

-- Oscar Niemeyer, the modernist architect who designed Brasilia, died at age 104.

-- "The Fracking of Rachel Carson." Via Orion Magazine.

-- What's it going to take to go home by the home through the United States, retrofitting them for energy efficiency and reducing our massive residential carbon footprint?

-- A liiterary look (sort of) at our taste for oil.

-- This exists: a Calvin & Hobbes search engine.

-- The Hawkeye Initiative pictures male comics characters in the same extraordinary positions as female comics characters. Hilarity ensues. An important point is reaffirmed. Here's the submission from Matt Bors.

-- A graphic turn for academic librarians.

-- On the hunger that young readers have for dystopian fiction.

-- High school journalists try to figure out newspaper economics.

-- The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, an excellent and important newspaper, is working very hard to prevent cuts. The Columbia Journalism looks at what "resetting" the paper for the future means.

-- Brendan Nyhan discusses the future of fact-checking in the wake of the 2012 election.

-- Chris Hughes and the transformation of The New Republic (one of the magazines that I listed as a favorite gift subscription in the Choose Books guide).

-- In Guernica: what does it mean when your name doesn't mean anything?

-- Rebecca Solnit essays on urban agriculture and  "revolutionary plots."

-- Herman Wouk on writing novels in his late-90s. (Via Chris M.)

-- See it here: "Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap." This is the documentary Ice-T made about the writing craft of rap, which is, amazingly, not talked about too much.

-- It's about time that this source of exploitation got more attention.

-- "Teach for America's Deep Bench." The American Prospect looks at how "the education nonprofit is also training the next generation of politicians, who have very specific ideas on school reform." Curious stuff. And did I ever tell you how I almost joined the TFA teacher corps in Las Vegas? Left a shadow life behind there...

-- "Writing is about specifying individuals, being very attentive to them and caring for them. It insists on nuances." Guernica interviews Israeli author David Grossman about war, art, Palestine, and tragedy.

-- What an American Civil War soldier has to do with Homer.

-- Irish love for Irish poetry.

-- Jeremy Bass on the forgotten dialect of poet Jack Gilbert, who died in November after a long illness. Here is the New Yorker's eulogy for him. Likewise from the Los Angeles Times.

-- Sifting through the poems of Octavio Paz over at Bookslut.

-- Roxane Gay's Year in Reading, part of the annual series at The Millions, which I always look forward to.

-- "Translating America, into Wolof."

-- Tim Parks on growing up with an artist.

Comments

[Pablo Franco]

Hi Anna. I'm a fan of your blog. Have you read "Joseph Anton"? I ask this because, although Mrs. Heller review of the book is very good, it feels at times bitter - like the work she's reviewing. Personally I enjoyed "Joseph Anton" - aside his rants and grandiloquence -, and woould like to know your opinion on the matter. Thanks!

[Anna Clark]

Hi Pablo: Thanks for your comments! I have not read "Joseph Anton," but I'm curious about it ... I think in my mind, I've told myself I need to read "The Satanic Verses" before I read JA. It's good to get your thumbs-up, though: it pushes it a little higher on the to-be-read list!