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Exciting news! The next Letter in the Mail, going out Friday, June 14, is from lit-scene superstar Maud Newton!
Not yet subscribed but want her letter? Please sign up before 12pm PT on Tuesday, June 11. (That’s today!)
Maud is an essayist, critic, blogger, and fiction writer whose work has appeared, well, pretty much everywhere, from the New York Times Book Review to Granta to The Awl.
...moreAt The Barnes and Nobel Review, Maud Newton interviews Naomi Alderman, winner of the Orange Award for New Writers and co-writer with Margaret Atwood of The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, a recently published e-novel only available on Watt.
...moreA big thank you to Maud Newton for shouting out the Happy Baby movie in the New York Times Magazine.
Fun fact from her blurb: “[Stephen] Elliott accidentally sent the chapters out of order to his editor, Dave Eggers, who actually preferred them that way.”
We love you back!
...moreSlow writers, you’re in good company. Maud Newton has a blog post up at Tin House about the blessing and the curse of taking your time with a book.
Here’s a small taste:
...moreI love Alex for many reasons, and one of the most selfish of those is that he tends to work for a long time on his novels.
Is the airline safety card more a work of the imagination than an actual instructional manual? This article guides us through the history of the often ignored “art of airline crisis.”
“Is it possible that in the golden age of aviation even the crashes were glamorous?
...moreThis article discusses the Klingon language—its creation and lasting influence (“people get married in Klingon ceremonies; one man tried (unsuccessfully) to make it his son’s native tongue”). The piece ends with a video in which linguist Marc Okrand explains how he invented Klingon.
...moreTwenty years before Slaughterhouse-Five, a broke Kurt Vonnegut came up with an idea for an atomic bow-tie. While he became known for his environmentalism later in life, in 1950, Vonnegut—like America at large—seemed ready to cash-in on the atomic.
...moreIt’s not always oil that we spill into the ecosystem. Every now and then a pet cockatoo is let loose or escapes, joins a wild flock, and teaches the natives how to speak. The phenomenon accounts for “numerous” reports by Australians who think they are hearing voices.
...moreIn this interview economic anthropologist David Graeber disputes the standard theory that the monetary system replaces the barter system, arguing that credit and debt come before money.
Graeber sheds light on the complex relationship between debt and morality, transitions from commodity to virtual money, and the relative importance of money versus debt, before dipping into the current financial crisis.
...moreMaud Newton’s NY Times essay, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace,” discusses yet another DFW-inspired trend–that is his “slangy approachability.”
He defined a writing style that has permeated through the blogosphere. His ability to combine legal diction with colloquialisms and “slacker lingo,” all to express one highly philosophical argument was indeed a DFW idiosyncrasy—one being reproduced by “a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.” Newton writes on the evolution of this trend and what has become of irony.
...moreLean Logic: A Dictionary For the Future and How To Survive It describes itself as “a community of essays about inventive, cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty.”
Building upon that characterization, this review presents Lean Logic as a hybrid of sorts—part encyclopedia, book, secular bible and survival guide—while defining its greatest strength as “the lightness with which it draws on knowledge from earlier periods of history, and from other cultures.”
The not-so-lean 736 page project was completed despite the death last year of its author, English ecologist, David Fleming, the inventor and advocate for the energy rationing scheme, Tradeable Energy Quotas.
...moreDoes anyone else think the question mark is the most beautiful of all punctuation marks?
Well, the very first question mark may have looked more like a colon. Discovered in Syriac manuscripts of the Bible from the fifth century, the double dot symbol is placed above a word near the beginning of a sentence to indicate to the reader that it is a question.
...moreMaud Newton has some relatable writing pains that she’s been ruminating on. It can take forced isolation and sometimes jail time to produce tangible, significant results.
This is the kind of isolation that can make the public realm difficult and overwhelming—a state Maud Newton describes as “going feral.” She picked up some appropriate reading that provides further evidence of this writerly antisocial state, that is “The Writer as Illusionist” by William Maxwell, which revolves around the idea that the writer is like an illusionist who “must be taken in by his own tricks.” Definitely an accurate summation of the mid-whirlwind writer’s experience.
...moreHave we been overlooking sound symbolism? Recent studies have shown that humans connect certain sounds with sensory perceptions and thus, the sound of a word could hint at its meaning. This article addresses how the idea fits into theories on language and its origins.
...moreRemember your first muse?
“My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then, I’ve written for and about and to and because of men.”
That is Kate Christensen in conversation with Maud Newton yesterday at The Awl.
...moreOrson Welles was self-conscious about the size of his nose, a small issue that lead to make-up malfunctions and a lot of prosthetics.
You can track this compulsion of a legendary actor/director through the size of his nose in his movies—it’s a whole new way to experience the classics.
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Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Some questions are impossible to answer.
...more“Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on.
It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say it’s an affinity of perspective — a morbid fixation on the absurdities of human existence — combined with precision, bluntness, and humor.”
Maud Newton praises the essays of E.B.
...moreMaud Newton’s enthusiasm is always infectious — and a few days ago she celebrated in glowing terms the most recent issue of The Paris Review, the first with its new editor, Lorin Stein.
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This week in New York The Future of Criticism with Lorin Stein and Maud Newton, John D’Agata and Thalia Field discuss the lyric essay, Alice Walker on activism, Salman Rushdie and Lee Bollinger discuss free speech in a globalized world, Mikael Kennedy shows his Polaroids at the Chelsea Hotel and Congress for Curious People symposium is held at Coney Island.
Over at The Awl, Maud Newton asks how scared we should be of groups like the Hutaree militia, which was recently broken up by the FBI for planning attacks on law enforcement.
On the one hand, she says, “When the Tea Party kicks you out of its massive tent, and neighboring militias dismiss you as a cult, you might just be out there on the fringiest fringe in Fringeville.”
On the other hand, she provides a terrifying catalog of militia-tastic things that are so close to the heart of our government that it almost makes me want to start a conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theorists.
...more“New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.”
Maud Newton ponders the potentially troublesome issue of digital remains, especially for writers.
...moreAt Maud, how much should philosophy and fiction have anything to do with each other?
If you liked Julie Klausner’s interview here at The Rumpus and want more, she has another interview over at The New Yorker Book Bench.
...moreBlog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it.
Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via)
“Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!” Jacket Copy has fun with illustrators’ pictures of their favorite literary figures and characters.
...moreI don’t know about you but this is the year I finish that @#$#@%! novel.
I got two hundred pages of rough stuff. Real rough stuff.
The first novel. The one I’m allowed to be cavalier about, right?
The one people will say, provided it ever gets published: oh that was just his first novel.
...moreI was out last week on vacation, but I’m back. And there’s a lot to catch up on. Here goes …
In Turkey, you can go to jail for using the letters Q, W and X. (via)
Even Bill and Ted might have gone to this library.
...more“God excoriated Eve more roundly and punished her more severely than He did Adam not because she was more wicked, but because she represented an actual threat. Seeking knowledge, she chose to eat the fruit, whereas Adam ate passively and only because she handed the fruit to him and had tried it first.
...moreIn 1996, Phillip Connors’ brother unexpectedly committed suicide. Now, over a decade later, Connors is getting closure through the completion of a 22,000 word account of his family’s experiences called “So Little to Remember”.
The piece, which tackles more than his family’s reactions to the suicide, began as a “thought experiment” put together by Connors to identify patterns in his brother’s life leading up to his unexpected death. “So Little to Remember” also reminds us of the important differences between life and writing about life, as the author explains in his note to Maud Newton. Ultimately, Connors feels his piece is independent from the events it is based on; a method of “letting go by making stories.”
“So Little to Remember” will be out in the latest issue of n+1 magazine. To tide you over, an excerpt is available on Maud Newton’s blog.
...more“Yet some scientists are suggesting that depression — peculiarly prevalent for a mental disorder — is not a malfunction at all, but an evolutionary adaptation, a state of mind which can have debilitating effects, but also promotes highly analytical thinking.”
Over at Maud Newton, a lively and multifaceted conversation about the potential benefits of depression.
...moreYour humble Rumpus Sunday Editor is smitten. Over the last couple weeks, the book blogs have been in form, publishing intelligent, hilarious, insightful, and riveting posts. In a word, they’ve been brilliant. Some, but most certainly not all, of my evidence is below.
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