Ernest Hemingway in a bathing suit and other important news
By Nico | June 15, 2012
I tweet this stuff all the time, but for those of you not on Twitter (Seriously? How can you not be on Twitter?) I’ve compiled this little Friday treat to get your weekend reading started.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll even become a semi-regular feature. I know, there are already a few great blogs doing this already, and the death of the book blog has been proclaimed loudly and repeatedly,(1) but so what? This is my list.
Have at it:
- Flavorwire previously collected “Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers,” and their latest is “Take a Dip: Literary Greats In Their Bathing Suits,” which, yes, includes a photo Ernest Hemingway. (via The Paris Review)(2)
- Klint Finley has posted selections from “5 Essays I Wish I’d Read as a Young(er) Man” in his blog Technoccult. Great stuff.
- In The Toronto Standard Natalie Zina Walschots has published a response to a sexist and degrading article written by Ben Kaplan for the National Post, “We Are Better Than This: ‘Distinct Pleasures’ and Canadian Music Journalism.” She points to a piece by Maura Johnston titled “How Not To Write About Female Musicians” which is also a must-read.
- HTML Giant is wonderful, and AD Jameson writes about the New Sincerity which deserves a read, “I am drinking gin & wrote about 18 long titles i randomly chose using wikipedia.” Also see “What we talk about when we talk about the New Sincerity.”
- Andrea Kuszewski writes about “The Essential Psychopathology Of Creativity” for H+, a fascinating breakdown of pathologies present in creative types and in non-neurotypical people, with a sideline on why the world of Gattica remains a dystopia.
- The Telegraph has a selection from “Sylvia Plath drawings at The Mayor Gallery.” I had no idea she was such an artist. I find the chianti bottle striking.
- Panic has a great post on pornography titled “The Deen Crush and Kink Obfuscation.” I don’t watch a lot of straight porn, and had never heard of James Deen before, but this post makes me think I should take a closer look. (Uh, no pun intended?)
- The Walrus published an essay by Stacey May Fowles last year about the disparity between male and female reviewers and the titles covered in “The Unbalancing Act.” Unfortunately, it remains true today, as evidenced by the charts compiled by Natalie Zina Walschots in “Closing The Gap: Reviewing Canadian Books Of Poetry Written By Women” and Sina Queyras’s post last year on “The Gatekeepers and the Glass Ceiling, Notes Toward an Essay on The Count.”
Which brings us to one of the things I’m most excited about: the creation of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, begun in response to VIDA, an American organization focusing on women in the literary arts. Inspired by Natalie Zina Walschots and Sina Queyras (see above links), they’ve begun a CWILA Count (more info here.) They’ve also begun interviewing female writers and reviews editors such as Sina Queyras, Laura Moss, Mark Medley and Michael Lista, among others. Worth reading.
Also, awesome news regarding the Literary Press Group of Canada: the decision to remove their funding for 2012 has been reversed. Thanks and big love to everyone who contacted their MP and otherwise promoted their cause. You guys rule.
Footnotes:
- Though this isn’t really a book blog, but a personal journal by a largely unknown writer. But whatevs. [↩]
- Posted for irony. See the following links. [↩]
Nico is a bibliophilic reader, writer, editor, reviewer, poet, blogger, hat wearer and kitten tickler. Nico's work has appeared most recently in Broken Pencil, The Antigonish Review, and Carousel, among other journals. Nico tweets as @plutopsyche.
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