40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read. Literary Kicks. Letters of Note – John Steinbeck: "It has never got easier" Remembering an inspiring teacher - Life stories. About two months ago, we lost a great man. His name was Jay Criche, and he was a teacher. He taught English for 30 years, 23 of them at Lake Forest High School. For most of that time, he was the head of the department, and he looked the part. He wore tweed sport coats most of the year, in weather cold or warm, and if I remember correctly, there were suede elbow patches on these sport coats.
He wore small wire-framed glasses, a thick mustache, and his hair was dark, dusted with gray. I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Mr. He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Mr. I don’t want to make this remembrance about the state of teachers in America, but Mr. I miss him, but he won’t be forgotten, not by me or the scores of students who sat before him. N1BR. Walt Whitman, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Afterlife | Book Think. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. [“Song of Myself,” section 6] Walt Whitman always wrote with great authority, even eagerness, about death. “Sane and sacred,” he calls it in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his great elegy for President Lincoln. But for all his prophesying, how could he—how could anyone—have foreseen the weirdness of his own afterlife?
I am brooding on these things after reading Cynthia Haven’s recent Book Haven article on “Frankenstein and Walt Whitman’s Brain.” You see, Walt Whitman’s postmortem brain was put into some sort of a jam jar, and somebody dropped it, and it shattered. Granted, this anecdote makes him only a tenuous footnote to the Frankenstein legend. Of course, this is all circumstantial evidence. Just another manic Monday « The Great Whatsit. Postscripts, follow-ups, and a few odds and ends I’ve wanted to share for a while: 1. Nostalgia or counternostalgia? The Jon Kessler Experience VBS.tv has a little four-part Art Talk! Interview with a friend of mine, Jon Kessler, who set up studio space out in Williamsburg in 1980. He took an entire factory building for $150 a month. I’d like to know how people think his storytelling — and Jon is a fantastic storyteller — falls into the “nostalgic” or “counternostalgic” camps I’ve been trying to sort out over the last few weeks. 2.
Also following up my “Magic of this broken world” posts is a line or two that stuck out at me while leading a book group discussion on part II of Luc Sante’s Low-Life sometime last week. Bowery characters [eccentrics who had achieved local notoriety for flamboyant drinking and storytelling] acquired a professional venue at Sammy’s Bowery Follies, which opened at number 267, on the site of some notorious dives of the past, such as McGurk’s the Mug. 3. 4. A few observations on Patti Smith’s “Rock n Roll Nigger” « The Great Whatsit. Or a few questions, at least. I’m curious about how you read (or hear) this song, performed last year by a 60-year-old singer generally regarded as the godmother of punk: If you don’t know the song, check out the lyrics here.
It closes out side one of the 1978 album Easter, which also included the top 20 hit “Because the Night,” a co-write with Springsteen.* Few albums could be so simultaneously mainstream and potentially subversive. In asking what you think about the song, I’m not looking for apologetic explanations, and I’m not asking you to decide whether or not you think it’s racist. I’m wondering what kinds of cultural work you think it does in the late 1970s and how you historicize the gesture (in this instance, from a white artist) toward cross-racial imagination or identification.
For Mailer (and perhaps for Ginsberg), this was a logical response to the Holocaust and Hiroshima. You might also connect Smith’s or Mailer’s cross-racial identifications with this gesture. For National Poetry Month: Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge” « The Great Whatsit. I miss Hart Crane this spring. It’s not that I’m a particular fan of his poetry: sometimes I’m tempted to paraphrase Doctorow on Poe and call him our “best bad poet.”
But for several spring semesters in a row I’ve included parts of The Bridge in my Writing New York class, and this year, for a variety of reasons, decided to drop him. What I lost, in part, was the need to explain modernism once we arrived at the early twentieth century. I’d spend part of a lecture rambling about connections and comparisons between modernist painting and poetry, using Joseph Stella’s immense, 5-panel painting “The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted” as a point of comparison (scroll down once you click here), along with Williams and Demuth on the figure 5 in gold. Then we’d settle in for a collaborative close reading of the “Proem” that prefaces Crane’s book-length masterpiece, his attempt at an American epic.
I miss him, though, for two reasons. And I miss him because I like his story, sad as it is. Steve Almond | The Artist and the Corporation: A Brief Meditation on the DIY Publishing Experience. The Dream goes like this: You write a book, a great book, and you send it out to whomever and a few weeks later, out of the blue, someone calls from New York City and says your name.
Then the book gets printed and reviewed in the holy places and someone else calls, this time from Los Angeles, and says another name, one you’ve heard of, a movie star name, and the call gets put through and pretty soon there’s a major motion picture in production and your book is suddenly number one on the great list of What Matters. Then a third call comes from Chicago… As Americans, we’re trained to think like this. What this model conveniently elides is the publishing industry’s fundamental flaw: it weds an artist to a corporation. Sometimes, this marriage is a very happy one indeed. My own experience with publishers has been, to put it mildly, mixed. On the one hand, I’m grateful to those corporations who have been hopeful and foolish enough to invest in my sorry ass. But it’s also incredibly liberating. Directory. Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing. Austin Kleon on Cultivating Creativity in the Digital Age.
By Maria Popova The genealogy of ideas, why everything is a remix, or what T.S. Eliot can teach us about creativity. UPDATE: Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist synthesizes his ideas on creativity and is absolutely fantastic. Austin Kleon is positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet. His Newspaper Blackout project is essentially a postmodern florilegium, using a black Sharpie to make art and poetry by redacting newspaper articles. In this excellent talk from The Economist‘s Human Potential Summit, titled Steal Like an Artist, Kleon makes an articulate and compelling case for combinatorial creativity and the role of remix in the idea economy.
Kleon, who has clearly seen Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix, echoes the central premise of my own recent talk on networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity: Nothing is completely original. Amen. And even more in the vein of the Brain Pickings ethos, reminiscent of this favorite quote by iconic designer Paula Scher: The Drum Literary Magazine. Beyond The Margins | Literary Kicks.