October 2016
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The Perfect Eerie Piano Scale
In honor of Halloween, Consequence of Sound has collected what they deem the “10 Essential Horror Movie Scores.” Following Scorsese’s argument that music and film are intrinsically tied, “[b]ecause there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images…
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Ponsot’s Patience
The poet Marie Ponsot is a late-blooming ninety-five. For the New York Times Book Review, William Logan reviews her new Collected Poems (Knopf), and follows her arc from early “secondhand Tolkein,” to a letting go of “hollow immensities.” “We read such…
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Julia Deck on the Game of Writing
To me, writing a book is also creating a game for both myself and the reader. Over at the Believer Logger, Natasha Boas talks to Julia Deck, author of Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, about unreliable narrators, conciseness, titles, Paris, French publishing…
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Rising Above the Rink: Remembering Bill Nunn
In those little moments, a higher truth emerges from above the rink: with some humor, peace becomes more possible.
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Song of the Day: “8 (circle)”
It takes courage and artistic vision to take risks with music that has already won you commercial success, but lasting artists persist in doing just that. Bon Iver’s third album, 22, A Million, supports this view. The familiarly warm and affecting…
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Flipping the Gender Script
Tired of the incessant number of novels describing women in terms of their slender bodies, simple minds, or sexual status? Over at McSweeney’s, read this hilarious satire from Meg Ellison where the gender script is flipped, and men are written…
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Mood Music
At Largehearted Boy, essayist, literary experimentalist, and scholar Mary Capello shares an annotated playlist for her new essay collection, Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press). She describes mood as the “companion and muse” for her writing: If there is…
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“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”
German children’s book author Thomas Mac Pfeifer spent over a year interviewing children who had migrated to Germany from war-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the purpose of hearing and collecting their favorite bedtime stories into one…
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How Fast Can You Run by Harriet Levin Millan
Lois Bassen reviews How Fast Can You Run by Harriet Levin Millan today in Rumpus Books.
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The Long Game
I’ve kept writer’s notebooks for probably almost 20 years now. I’m very slow to fill them… the notebook I have now I’ve had for nine years now—it’s really beat up. Over at Chicago Review of Books, Lisa Katzenberger speaks with…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
It’s 2016 and the first ever set of emojis now belongs to MOMA. AI is getting stronger and stronger and probably just wants to rip us off. Frederik Vercruysse’s photographs of haunting and serene empty spaces (are nice to look…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #76: American Songbag
In the broadest sense, I think of this work as being about the stuff of life: excitement, love, disappointment, pride, nature, cities, war, loneliness, work, class distinction, communication.