Selling loyalty, slinging deals, getting screwed, and getting even.
You smooth your new slacks. The tag says “Express,” but you bought them at TJ Maxx, the one just across from the Barnes & Noble, at the Kirkland mall. You are not allowed to wear jeans at Barnes & Noble, or sneakers, or logos of any sort. This is in the “Welcome to Our Team” employee handbook you received last week. …
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This is a story about one of the newest forms of communication—social media—and one of the oldest—poetry—and how the two joined forces for social change.
On April 20, 2010, nine students chained themselves to the Arizona state capitol building to protest Arizona’s new anti-immigrant legislation, SB 1070. Their slogan: “We are chained to the capitol just like our community is chained by this legislation.” While others chanted and gave speeches, the nine students sat silently and with dignity as police officers cut the chains and arrested them. Of course their protest was posted on YouTube, and when a friend sent the link to Francisco X. Alarcón, a prize-winning poet and professor at the University of California–Davis, Alarcón responded as poets have for millennia when they witness acts of courage in the face of oppression: He wrote a poem.
Alarcón posted “For the Capitol Nine” to his Facebook page, addressing the young people directly: “you … / chain yourselves / to the doors / of the State Capitol / so that terror / will not leak out / to our streets… / your courage / can’t be taken / away from us / and put in jail / you are nine / young warriors / like nine sky stars.”
So many “friends” and “friends of friends” responded to the poem that Alarcón decided to create a Facebook group and invite other poets to post poems on the subject.
The word went out over Facebook and Twitter and poet to poet, so that by August 2011 “Poets Responding to SB 1070” included more than 1,200 poems by prominent and emerging poets from all over the country and around the world. Eight volunteer moderators now manage the site, keeping up with submissions and choosing poems for a weekly feature on La Bloga, the Latino literary blog. They also are preparing a hard-copy anthology.
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— Algis Valiunas, for National Affairs
Jean de Brunhoff: The Story of Babar
Reader Submission: Title by Kendra Leonard
(via The Guardian)
While the upper-classes remain perennially interesting to publishers and readers alike, is it affluent middle-class or working-class characters who are being squeezed out of literary fiction?
Ernest Hemingway’s suicide in 1961—fifty years ago on July 2—“remains one of the iconic American deaths,” writes Robert Roper for Obit Magazine. “He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer.”
Not only was Hemingway a rock star author in his time, but he also transformed himself into an icon of some his day’s biggest socio-cultural changes. Which is, of course, why American readers are perpetually interested in Hemingway’s suicide. Barrel-chested, he personally stood for liberty and against Fascism before it was fashionable. Paranoid depression crippled him at the beginning of a new era of neuroscience and psychological therapy. And Hemingway’s problematic, overblown masculinity drew near-universal ire from a burgeoning, radicalizing feminist movement.
Half a century later, can the legacy of Ernest Hemingway escape his suicide?
As a former English major, I’ve slashed my way through tons (literally) of books. The aggregate weight of your literary explorations becomes a sort of status symbol on campus, with extra-shiny merit badges awarded for the really heavy tomes—the Ulysseses and Infinite Jests and David Copperfields and The Count of Monte Cristos. From a semi-serious academic perspective, this logorrheaic one-upmanship makes a sort of professional sense, but that doesn’t explain why thousands of non-scholarly types cart along dense snoozers like War and Peace or Les Misérables or Anna Karenina on their sandy vacations when they could actually be having fun. Mark Oconnell has a theory: Readers have Stockholm syndrome. Read more …
As more aspects of our lives are digitized, literature is an increasingly crucial means of expressing, understanding, and preserving places and their influences.
At the end of the eighties, when I was in middle school, a development threatened a parcel of land a…
(Source: thenewinquiry)
“At its core, chick lit is about a lot of things that I actually find very interesting,” writes S.E. Smith of This Ain’t Livin’. “Starting with the fact that these character-driven books usually focus on women and their lives. Not on men. Some feature romantic elements, but the woman is the centre of the story, as are her female friends. This is a marked departure from, uhm, pretty much every literary genre ever.”
Not right, not left, but forward thinking, Utne Reader combs the alternative, independent, and digital press for thoughtful journalism, artful storytelling, and emerging ideas.
Rep. Greg Harris, the chief...
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The Manufacture of Sadness by Maya Edelman
