2011
-

Saturday Morning Links
Brian here, blogging one-handed since ninjas tripped me Thursday and fractured my radial head (which sounds like what would happen if a particularly famous band where to talk about breaking up). I’ll try to keep it from slowing me down.…
-

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #81: A Bit of Sully in Your Sweet
This isn’t a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach.
-

To the Language of Doves
Darwish’s identity (and the Palestinian identity) has been, at least partly, developed in exile. Darwish writes: “I am absence./ The heavenly and the expelled.” Here he speaks not only for himself, but for his people.
-

Writers from an Editor’s Perspective
Dinty W. Moore, an editor at Brevity and the anthology Best Creative Nonfiction, is interviewed by Matador Notebook on writers. He makes some interesting and useful points about the ever-branching taxonomy of specialized writers: “But when these labels become barbed-wire…
-

Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
If you don’t use these words, they’re gonna go bad. Get super intimate with the moon. Where’d this guy get a million circuit boards? Baby boomers have their own texting lingo!
-

Albums of Our Lives: Shooter Jennings’ Put the O Back in Country
Sometimes the boy you love introduces you to the man you fall in love with. The boy and the man are not the same person. This is not intentional.
-

Spoiled Stories
Do you want someone to come along and spoil that short-story you’re about to begin? Yes you do, says this study. The “Hedonic Ratings of Spoiled & Unspoiled Stories” chart, compiled by U.C. San Diego researchers, addresses three distinct genres—ironic…
-

A History of Gun Control
One of the Longreads selections from the past week is this article in the Atlantic on gun control and the ambiguity of the second amendment’s language. This story doesn’t just divide into a two-sided argument over the right to bear…
-

Floating in Photography
Bomblog interviews Cole Rise, whose landscape photographs are described as both cinematic and surreal. The conversation gets at the artist’s process, the importance and difficulty of subtlety, travel and Mount Tamalpais. Rise also speaks to the floating quality of his…
-

Gatsby Forever American
There another Gatsby adaptation in the works. F Scott Fitzgerald’s American masterpiece has resurfaced over and over again—as a couple films, as an orchestral production by the Madison Symphony, a theater piece, a spin-off novel and an opera. The desire…
-

Climate Change Fiction
I’m With the Bears, a collection of short stories on climate change, is due for publication this October. Published by Verso—who describes it as “an aim to bring our probable future within the grasp of our comprehension”—the project’s proceeds will…