Posts by author
Walter Gordon
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Endangered Languages
“Different languages highlight the varieties of human experience, revealing as mutable aspects of life that we tend to think of as settled and universal, such as our experience of time, number, or color.” At National Geographic, Russ Rhymer writes about…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Watch this hilariously dated video of a woman walking her pet Leopard in London, because why not. Red light, Blue light? A look at the connection between color and language. Albert Einstein tried to preserve his marriage with an organized, thoughtful…
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László Krasznahorkai at City Lights
Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai will be reading at City Lights in San Francisco this Thursday, June 28th. The reading comes soon after the long awaited English release of Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel, Satantango. Called, somewhat amiably, “a fucking miserable novel” by Bookslut, Satantango was…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
“I am throwing up in my hat. I am throwing up in my hat.” Drunk texts from famous authors. In an attempt to learn more about how human babies learn to speak, scientists at the University of Hertfordshire are building robots…
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Brain Activity
Glasgow-based artist and illustrator David Shrigley’s largest show to date, Brain Activity, opens tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Called “Kierkegaard, only with marker pens,” Shrigley’s work presents a powerful mix of comedy and existential profundity. In…
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Lonely Art
“…Loneliness is a word — easily enough spoken or written, like death or love – but really it’s a deep sadness, which is also a force, driving so many of our desires and actions, and at the same time shameful…
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Don’t “Do” Rome
At Full Stop, Stephanie Bernhard writes about why we shouldn’t “do” cities. “To suggest that a city or site can be “done,” like dishes, the laundry, or homework, reduces said city to the limits of the do-er’s consciousness or experience.”
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The Death (and Rebirth?) of the Book Review
Why review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question. Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing “death” of the book review is perhaps a more nuanced…
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Clarice Lispector
“But what if there were no one around with whom to reach an agreement about the meaning of a word? What if the thing you’re trying to express can’t really be understood by anyone else?” Sarah Gerard looks at Wittgenstein,…
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Ben Lerner in The New Yorker
“In the name of clarity, a lot of authors offer what strike me as basically pre-fabricated structures of feeling, leaving no room for the reader to participate in the construction of meaning.” Ben Lerner, poet and author of Leaving the…
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The Utopian Project
“In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea.” Charles Simic writes on Poetry and Utopia for the New York Review of Books.
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Cattle Haul
The latest story featured by Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading comes from National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage The Bones. The story, originally published in A Public Space, is a powerful look at a long drive across the…