March 2010
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It must be strange to be an icon, even if that’s what you’ve chosen for yourself. Although, I guess in this world, of branding, of Facebook, of photo-retouching and plastic surgery and cybersex and virtual everything, we’re all icons,
things instead of people,
things instead of artists, and our art, if we have any, is a product, like our lives and bodies.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
The poet Rita Dove has described Clifton’s work as a “glimpse into an egoless, utterly thingful and serene world.” In poems like “hag riding,” the narrator is a proud “I,” but one who calls the reader to action. Ideas that begin personally for Clifton end expansively, and a calm tone disarms the most built-up ideas in her short lines. Her point of view, as exacting and brave as it so often is, is at other times delicate -- presented to us almost diplomatically, as an option or a suggestion. Upon receiving it, it is hard to imagine thinking along any other lines."
by
Liz Colville
"Language is such a beautiful thing -- and when thinking about it as part of some sort of emotional and energetic equation, I like to think about how malleability can affect potential. . . . Not being able to see, or seeing a world that is constantly moving (because of nystagmus and dipolopia) means that what I see is active. All of it vibrates, I’m surrounded by shuddering light."
by
JC Hallman
"There’s been a major change in the BDSM community with the advent of the Internet. It used to be that you already had to be an outsider to find it. Now, it’s a bit more conventional. People find the Society of Janus online, and it’s like, 'Drop the kids at the babysitters and let’s go.'"
by
Ailene Sankur
About Africa, I’m not overly romantic. For over two years, I lived and worked in two African countries; my eyes were opened to the poverty and the suffering, and to the massive government corruption that Raffaele notes. It’s sensible for Raffaele to describe and decry these patterns. But my eyes also saw the people’s tenacity and creativity. What I don’t like is Raffaele’s simplistic homogenizing of places and peoples.
by
Barbara J. King
"Which brings me to why it’s embarrassing to be a memoirist. You are need, undisguised. Narcissism, unleashed. It’s the reason that when writers get together, the memoirist in the group tends to mumble and hang her head while the fiction writer shouts to the bartender for another round and the poet paints her lips and makes eyes at the patrons."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
"At some point I realized that
The Ticking is the Bomb was not simply about the 'few bad apples' at Abu Ghraib, or even about those in the Bush Administration (basically the entire Bush administration) which ordered the torture -- none of that was, or is, very surprising. That Cheney would torture someone is not surprising. What was surprising was how quickly we Americans accepted it, so the book became more a study of the darker impulses in each of us, that led us to embrace torture."
by
Richard Wirick
"Like I tell my students, Russia is very much like a marsh, like a swamp, once you get in it, you can't get out. There's a magnetic pull. You enter this world of empire, and you're forever finding, discovering new forces, new elements, new avenues of discovery. Partly because Russian culture is still not well explored, not like, say, French culture, which is very well known in the Western world. Part of it is the language barrier -- Russian is a very complicated language. It's different. You have to learn that before you can understand the culture."
by
Jessa Crispin
The Romantic cliché that “the artistic or inventive type” is naturally melancholic, neurasthenic, or hysterical is perilous, as it risks “reducing art and innovation to a matter of difference, pathology, or even madness.” He has a point. It’s not that “great artists, great authors, are all ill, however sublimely, or that one’s looking for a sign of neurosis or psychosis like a secret in their work, the hidden code in their work. They’re not ill; on the contrary, they’re a rather special kind of doctor.” Hypochondria, for Dillon’s nine characters, was “both an illness and a cure: the catalyst or condition that allowed the artist or thinker to function… a kind of calling, a vocation, that structured a life, or the productive portion of a life.”
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"Narrative art, unlike historical analysis, achieves its aims through the exploration of metaphors, and such metaphors rarely lead the artist into everyday contemporary political issues -- like health reform, for example, or economic recovery programs -- but instead draw the artist toward the more universal love-and-death themes, making the political nature of their work less obvious on the surface. There is also probably an inherent distance between writers, who are rarely politicians except as dissidents, and politicians, who rarely read fiction or poetry. The absurdity of politics is not new. Satire is always possible. The execution of satirists by enraged politicians is also always possible."
by
Sean P. Carroll
The new Monster Lit seemed to promise two things: that it would get people to read classic literature who otherwise would not, and that the monsters would shed something new about the work, and vice versa. But after reading almost every title to come out of the new “genre,” it seems all Monster Lit really marks is the swan song of the literary tropes the aughties have been inundated with: zombies, vampires, and Austenmania. It also seems to celebrate the quick dollar.
by
Selena Chambers
"I don't think being born into a particular group automatically confers cultural knowledge. Also, cultural norms vary widely. To write Thousand Pieces of Gold, for example, I had to research life in northern China which I knew nothing about -- and which is as different from southern China as American northern states are from the southern. . . . That's exactly why I love to write -- and read. I get to go on voyages of discovery that gift me with new insights."
by
Terry Hong
Their little note symbolized a hope that the book might have the same magical effect on the person picking it up as it did on the original owner. It implies that books -- more specifically used books -- have stories to tell that books from chain bookstores simply can't. They have history and personality, which is exactly what readers are hoping to find in the first place when they take a book off the shelf.
by
Micah McCrary
Because of its closed-up sealed-off nature, the oyster signals solitude; at the same time, because of the fluidity of its sexual nature, it tantalizes with boundary transgressions. Given these twin associations, the fact that the oyster stands for gluttony should be no shock: it’s alone and mysterious, yet capable of embracing maleness-and-femaleness in a single life. Is it any wonder that we eat oysters to celebrate and to seduce?
by
Barbara J. King
Possibly at the risk of sacrificing one’s own element of hipster credibility, the book makes it exceedingly difficult not to nurture a simmering bit of sympathy for Leno at the times he is most vigorously tried. Although by all accounts his comedic talent is described in unrelenting middle-of-the-road terms, The Late Shift constructs a Leno figure that’s equal parts humble, generous, and overwhelmingly good-natured.
by
Emma Kat Richardson
“I was a musician as a younger person, seriously so, but I just finally couldn't see myself living as a musician. Bad hours, hard life. And when I began to write, I knew quickly two things: it would be poetry, since poetry is so rich and rigorous; it would be poetry, since poetry is so close to music. I set one instrument aside, my guitar, and picked up another, my pen. I love the rhythms, harmonies, counterpoints, phrasings, chords, stories that I learned in music and can create, in a different way, in poetry."
by
Paul Holler
"I hate to make it sound like poetry, for me, is so completely grounded in the unconscious and the effortless, because the very act of writing poetry, for me, is not only constantly negotiating how to tap into that unconscious space, but how to communicate very precise ideas, often arguments so often, in my work, about race, sexuality, and desire."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
