Notable NYC: 9/23–9/29
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...morePosts Tagged: maria popova
Notable NYC: 4/15–4/31
Saturday 4/15: Protest in support of releasing Donald Trump’s tax returns. Bryant Park, 1 p.m., free. Thom Donovan and Marissa Perel join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 4/16: Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mahogany Browne, and Jive Poetic read poetry. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 3 p.m., free.
...moreHow Books Saved Mary Oliver’s Life
Feeling anxious about today’s election? Brain Pickings gives us a look at how writer Mary Oliver copes when times are tough: The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood […]
...moreThe 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 the basic necessities of friendship, [Welty] suggests, that sparked in us the evolutionary need for […]
...moreSaving Our Minds
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow […]
...morePerhaps the Greatest Pleasure
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Brain Pickings shares with us some key moments […]
...moreWilla Cather on Happiness
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. Brain Pickings shares with us a beautiful little vignette from Willa Cather’s masterpiece, My Ántonia, describing happiness in a perfect and simple way: with a character […]
...moreReading for a Cloudy Day
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova muses on Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which details the true story of Luke Howard, a 19th century English meteorologist whose work was admired by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Aside from chronicling the unlikely friendship between a […]
...moreKafka’s Father
Franz Kafka’s letters reveal how the author’s father impacted his writing and his life, and a relationship fraught with fear. Kafka worried about his father’s “intellectual domination” creating an environment of “emotional tyranny.” Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova finds in Kafka’s letters a deeply haunting father-son relationship: What I would have needed was a […]
...moreAnatomy of a Motherfucker
Maria Popova collects the advice of Cheryl Strayed and uses Strayed’s words to deconstruct motherfuckery. Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was “lazy and lame,” Strayed recounts how she “finally reached a point where the prospect of […]
...moreMaking Art and Being an Artist
When does an artist get to be called an artist? Anne Truitt explored the labels in her diary seven years in the making, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings looks at Truitt’s work and the “existential discomfort” at facing her life’s retrospective. Truitt wrote: The “just me” reaction was, […]
...moreWord of the Day: Kakorrhaphiophobia
(n.) an abnormal fear of failure or defeat; from the Greek kakos (“bad, evil”); syn. atychiphobia Everybody in L.A. fails. We just do. —Moby, from “Creativity and Freedom to Fail” Maria Popova of Brainpickings pertinently asks in her March 2014 review of Sarah Lewis’s insightful book The Rise, “How, then, can we transcend that mental block, […]
...moreLearning to Look Closer
Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova talks with cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz about her new book On Looking, which is about the way sensory awareness impacts our perception of reality. The two discuss how “a writer is a professional observer” and how when you look at things more closely, you see—and imagine—them differently: When you […]
...moreGrimm Fairy Tales Just Got Grimmer
British art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights a recently reissued collection of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm with striking, discomfiting drawings by Hockney. As Popova […]
...moreTo Sleep, Perchance to Write
You’ve read about famous authors’ workspaces, writing schedules, and semi-compulsive rituals, but have you read about their sleep habits? Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi and Rumpus illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to create a series of super-charming illustrations of writers correlating their wake-up times with their creative productivity. (Of course Bukowski got up at noon.) Check […]
...moreHear Virginia Woolf’s Voice
Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. In the recording, Woolf reads from an essay on craft (which Popova conveniently reprints in the post): “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell […]
...moreAdvice from Vonnegut
Advice my father gave me: never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. To celebrate Kurt Vonnegut, Maria Popova posted on her Brain Pickings an interesting list of advices the author use to give his children, excerpted from his collection of letters.
...moreFairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
In the 1920s, while living in Paris, poet E. E. Cummings wrote fairy tales for his only little daughter Nancy, which was an unknown fact until 1965. Only four survived and published in a small booklet accompanied by drawing by Canadian artist John Eaton. In Brain Pickings, Maria Popova managed to track down the first edition of […]
...moreRemembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection of 22 interviews and profiles of the beloved author.” A preview: Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself […]
...moreIgnore This Advice
Policy Mic has a fun post about the four worst things people tell young writers about writing. Perhaps the most important of these to disregard is “Good writers always write well”: Imagine you are someone who has no idea how to play a guitar. One day, you pick up a guitar and run your fingers […]
...moreNew York through Jack Kerouac’s Eyes
Maria Popova from Brain Pickings takes a look at a chapter titled “New York Scenes” from Kerouac’s 1960 book, Lonesome Traveler. According to Popova, the chapter is “a kind of narrative emotional cartography of Manhattan, woven of fascinating sketches of Gotham’s vibrant life and cast of characters as recorded in Kerouac’s travel journals, written in his signature […]
...more“A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings”
Happy Birthday, Susan Sontag. You would have been 80 today. Here is an entry from her collection of journals and notebooks, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. Also, check out Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton and Maria Popova’s fantastic collaborative illustration, Susan Sontag on Art.
...moreThe Wishing Tree
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings got her hands on a copy of William Faulkner’s only children’s book, written for his stepdaughter (and a few other children in his life) and published in a print run of 500. With words like “choss” and “youall,” it may not be the best way to teach kids new vocabulary, […]
...moreSusan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts
Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton has teamed up with Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings) to illustrate selected excerpts from Susan Sontag’s diaries. The artwork is available on Etsy as an 11×14 print on heavy cotton rag paper with razored edges in a limited edition of 300, signed and numbered, bearing a hand-stamped inscription on the back. They’re also donating a […]
...more“This Is Not About Quality Control”
The publishing industry is battling the Internet again. Or publishing stepped on the Internet’s foot and refuses to apologize. Or Maria Popova wanted to use more than three pictures in a post about My Ideal Bookshelf and Little, Brown said no. In any case, Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay wrote about it at HTMLGIANT: I […]
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