Billboard for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown on Sunset Boulevard, 1974.
Willie Osterweil and Susan Salter Reynolds on the perils of freelancing: “…I finished a book this morning. It’s called The Least Cricket of Evening, and it’s by an essayist named Robert Vivian out of University of Michigan and, I could’ve been six years old, I mean, I just had the same feeling, like, ‘Oh, what he can do with words, just amazing.’ That kind of awe. And I was glad of that because I’ve been so angry, I’ve been stomping around, I’ve been so angry about the Times. At some moments after too many glasses of wine, it’s like, ‘I never want to see another book! I never want to read another book!’ And then you read this beautiful thing …”
Tom Bissell on the commingling of fiction and nonfiction, the art of “paying attention,” and Tommy Wiseau of The Room: “[A] lot of the world’s mediocre fiction would be dispatched with if people only wrote fiction when they thought to themselves, ‘I’m probably going to spend a lot of time on it, to no immediate financial gain.’”
Tom Bissell on the commingling of fiction and nonfiction, the art of “paying attention,” and Tommy Wiseau of The Room: “[A] lot of the world’s mediocre fiction would be dispatched with if people only wrote fiction when they thought to themselves, ‘I’m probably going to spend a lot of time on it, to no immediate financial gain.’”
From the Tulane archive: a “down-right deranged” Darwin-themed parade: “…perhaps the weirdest parade theme ever to grace New Orleans was the post-Civil War tribute to Charles Darwin that doubled as a protest against Reconstruction. If the costume designs are to be believed, this particular parade was unmitigated nightmare fuel … In 1873, Mardi Gras revelers from the Mistick Krewe of Comus — unversed in this newfangled evolutionary theory and angry at the Northern interlopers — dressed up as the ‘missing links’ between animals, plants, and humans. Therefore, you had frightening human-grape and human-corn hybrids running around and fauna bearing the faces of Ulysses S. Grant, other hated politicians, and Darwin himself.”
Stacey Patton on the legions unemployed graduate students: “‘A big part of what we do in graduate education is foster this sense of vocation and teaching for love and passion for what you do,’ says Mr. Bousquet… ‘We socialize people into accepting the coin of reputation as status capital. Some people are so deeply socialized into the regime of payment by way of status that they are essentially trapped in it for life.’”
Bin Laden, the poetry scholar: ”It is somewhat jarring to imagine Bin Laden, sequestered in his Pakistan lair, pondering Islamic poetry as he concocts further plans to attack America. Then again, knowing that Bin Laden badly wanted to be seen as a redeemer of the Arabic world, the high-handed (and, it should be said, ham-fisted) literary allusion is not surprising, if all the more desperate for the author’s insane aspirations.”
Ploughshares begins its First Drafts series in conversation with Lauren Groff, Kevin Moffett, and Christine Shutt: “The great Southern Bard Barry Hannah once said: I don’t advocate anything to the young writer except the loneliness with a pencil and a white sheet of paper. My hope is that this interview — and the ones to follow — will remind us that we’re never altogether alone in that loneliness.”
Luciferous Logolepsy, a collection of over 9,000 of the most obscure words English has to offer: “The name of this project is also its description: Luciferous [adj. - illuminating, literally and figuratively] Logolepsy [n. - an obsession with words], in other words: ‘an illuminating obsession with words.’”
