The Real Fake News
In 2017, newscaster cameos may be the only fact-fiction crossovers for which people have no difficulty keeping the two concepts apart.
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Posts Tagged: BBC
David Bowie’s Final Finale
Bowie is gone now. The Magic Shop, too. It’s all gone—New York City, too, in a way.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
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My Life with Annie Lennox: Nostalgia
I don’t use the term “lifelong hero” frivolously. There are a lot of people I respect and wish to emulate; Annie Lennox, however, is the only “lifelong hero” I’ll ever have. I need her.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Nina Stibbe
Author Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism.
...moreMake Like Bunnies
BBC One and Netflix are joining forces to produce a four-part miniseries of Watership Down. The new series intends to give the female rabbits a more prevalent role: On the bright side, Aitken did announce the miniseries’ intent to strengthen the roles of the female rabbits, an element of Adams’ original novel that often garners […]
...moreThe Heroine’s Journey
What do Jane Eyre, Catherine Linton, and Katniss Everdeen have in common? “They can’t be pinned down. They are dazzlingly complex,” says Samantha Ellis, author of How to Be a Heroine, over at the BBC. Great heroines are fiercely passionate, Ellis writes. “And maybe that is really why these heroines last, because they make our own […]
...moreNon-British People Pick the Most British Novel
The BBC asked a bunch of non-British people to pick the 100 best British novels of all time and they came up with this. Spoiler alert: Middlemarch is number one.
...more“Hello”: An Adele News Roundup
Since the release of 25, Adele has—unsurprisingly—dominated music news. The singer has been breaking records all month. First her single “Hello” smashed record views on Youtube and, at release, the album sold over 900,000 copies on iTunes in its first day, and 2.5 million in its first week. Billboard projects the sales of 25 to […]
...moreNew Dylan Thomas Poem, Fresh Off the Presses
It’s the literary equivalent of a lost Beatles track. In 1942, Dylan Thomas published a poem in Lilliput magazine. Shortly thereafter, the magazine went defunct, and its archives were acquired by “the late porn baron Paul Raymond.” Today, the poem will be unveiled to the public for the first time in seventy years.
...moreUniversal Library Cards
In a plan to boost literacy rates, Scotland is testing a program to give all children automatic library memberships. The pilot program gives library cards out upon birth, reports BBC.
...moreEl-P and Ninja Collaboration “Coming Soon”
A post on Instagram from El-P (@thereallyrealelp) of Run The Jewels with Die Antwoord’s Ninja says only “Coming soon…” which Ninja (@zef_alien) also shared with the caption “EL-P vs NINJA.” Some believe this alludes to a coming collaboration between these two artists, but it’s unclear how or when this mysterious collab will manifest, considering both Run The Jewels […]
...moreLanguage: “A Barometer of Society’s Health”
For the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, two authors who invented languages to color their fictional worlds. In addition, the article considers how words created by novelists are adopted by contemporary culture: Language, as dystopian novels remind us over and over, is a barometer of a society’s health. […]
...moreThe End of Bouquinistes?
Amazon launched an online bookstore two decades ago. Since then, the Internet has been changing the way readers buy books. Paris has been a major book-selling city since the 17th century, when the first bouquinistes began lining the banks of the Seine. The 240 bouquinistes sell everything from the rare to the out-of-print, but now […]
...moreRich Writers Get Richer
For most writers, income may be falling, but not for everyone. A new study shows that just as in other industries, income disparity is a growing problem between the writing elite and the rest of us. BBC News reports that just 5% of writers are earning 42% of all writing-related income, while the bottom half of professional […]
...moreThe Best Year in Literature
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for books ever.” The Guardian wonders, though, what other years could give 1925 a run for its money?
...moreWord of the Day: Agacerie
(n.); allurement, enticement, coquetry; flirtation; from the French agacer (“to tease”) Fictional characters – unlike the messy organisms from which they derive – float free from the sordid contingencies of the body, because, no matter how convincingly they’re portrayed as being embodied, the medium within which they operate is, self-evidently, a mental one. –Will Self, […]
...moreRoboNovelist
Is it conceivable for robots to compete with the “flesh-and-blood novelist?” Over at the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the possibility and the ethical ramifications of algorithms writing the next Anna Karenina. So far, however, Anderson suggests that developers of such technologies have hit a snag: Even if a string of zeroes and ones evolves to understand what […]
...moreBurnt and Found
[Lowry] spent a decade working on In Ballast to the White Sea, but the draft was lost when his shack near Vancouver in Canada burned down in 1944. However, it has transpired that Lowry had given an early copy to his first wife’s mother. Seventy years after the fire, In Ballast to the White Sea, British […]
...moreNotes on Self
At Salon, Laura Miller rebukes Will Self’s criticism of George Orwell at the BBC, arguing that the British novelist has misinterpreted “Politics and the English Language.” She emphasizes the importance that, in his essay, Orwell discussed political writing and did not suggest his “rules” apply to fiction.
...moreA Million Pound Book
The first printed book in the English language was just sold at auction for £1,082,500. Coming in at 540 years old, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye revamps Greek mythology idols as chivalric heroes and is considered the crowning achievement of William Caxton, “the father of printing in England.”
...moreRiding On Trains With Pushkin
A city in Siberia is reportedly offering free rides on the underground to people who can recite at least two verses from any poem by Alexander Pushkin, one of Russia’s greatest poets.
...moreModern Art in Nazi Germany
This BBC story goes into fascinating detail about the way the degenerate art was displayed alongside insulting graffiti, and, of course, what role Hitler’s youthful art education played in all this. (Via.) In 1937, the Nazi regime staged two simultaneous art exhibitions, one with art they supported (“statuesque blonde nudes along with idealized soldiers and landscapes”) […]
...moreMy Kingdom for a Better Burial Site
Richard III, whom Shakespeare portrayed as deformed and murderous, has been dug up not in a cathedral or mausoleum but underneath a parking lot. The BBC reports that after extensive research and DNA testing, archaeologists are sure “beyond reasonable doubt” that the remains belong to the fifteenth-century king. As it turns out, whatever liberties Shakespeare […]
...moreWomen-Only Worlds in Science Fiction
At the BBC, writer Sarah Hall explores “the popular motif in science fiction of an all-women society surviving without men.” In the two-part program, Hall talks with authors, professors, and science fiction historians, looking at how science fiction “has been used to examine relationships between the sexes,” and how the genre “has examined the different […]
...moreIllustrations in The Joy of Sex
“The images were graphic – they showed genitals and countless sex positions – but they were also artistic, and tasteful.” BBC takes a closer look at The Joy of Sex forty years after its publication. The piece examines how publishers sought to avoid obscenity charges by using hand-drawn illustrations rather than photographs, focusing on creating […]
...moreListen to This!
In 1958 Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler discussed each other’s writing in this BBC interview. Being seasoned wordsmiths on the subject, they discuss what makes a British thriller versus an American thriller (apparently “thriller” is an elusive term), heroes and villains and frustrations with bestseller lists. This conversation is definitely worth a listen!
...morePoetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
I love Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb.” He hated it. On a side note, I really love that the BBC is willing to spend 30 minutes on the story behind a single poem. This is, I think, a good way to approach an online poetry journal–make it something other than a paper journal transferred onto […]
...morePoetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Alison Flood, writing in The Guardian implores her fellow citizens to vote in the BBC’s poll for the nation’s favorite poet. She’s worried that there will be a rehash of 1995, when Britain chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” as its favorite poem. Her personal choice of Gerard Manley Hopkins isn’t bad, in my opinion. I feel […]
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