Columns
-
Notable Portland: 9/8–9/14
Thursday 9/8: Oregon authors Clemens Starck (Old Dogs, New Tricks) and Harold Johnson (The Fort Showalter Blues) share from their latest work. Broadway Books, 7 p.m., free. Margaret Wappler reads from her 90s nostalgia meets fantasy space travel novel, Neon…
-
The Power of Unreality
While fiction embraces the flights of fancy that come with imagination, nonfiction is fairly hostile to writers who stray too far away from the objective facts of the story. How closely should writers of nonfiction stick to facts? At Electric Literature,…
-
Pregnant Words
In the New York Times, Rachel Cusk takes on two new memoirs about infertility and the quest for motherhood to explore the wholly compelling “half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization.” Julia Leigh’s Avalanche relates six years of…
-
Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
-
Albums of Our Lives: Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West
How Isaac Brock sings it, it’s nearly cheerful, almost an anthem: I’m trying / I’m trying to / drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.
-
The Endangered List
The Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, has launched a campaign to save fifty words and phrases it deems are dying from lack of use, reports Alison Flood for the Guardian: Although language change is inevitable, it’s too bad to…
-
The Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be…
-
America’s Reading Habits
The Pew Research Center has released an interesting set of data on reading in America, and it’s not all bad. In fact, their data indicates, among many things, that print books are far from obsolete—and actually dominate e-books—and that reading consumption…
-
This Week in Posivibes: Ultimate Painting
James Hoare (of Veronica Falls) and Jack Cooper (of Mazes) are releasing their third LP under the name Ultimate Painting on September 30 on Trouble in Mind Records. Dusk is an “autumnal opus…[of] gentle pop hum,” meaning it sounds a lot like Velvet Underground in…
-
Aesthetics and Poetics
Over at The Walrus, Michael Prior talks with poet Hoa Nguyen about the assessment of poetry, poetic communities in the US and Canada, and the role of silence and space in her own poetry: I see spacing as a way…
-
The Middle Season
My doctor told me to begin with adding five minutes to my morning walk. During those five minutes, I recalled the life I’d once had—that intense life that ambition gave me—and the man I’d once been.
