linkses

Trying to start dropping links here, with commentary, that would otherwise go on Twitter or Tumblr or GoodReads without. Trying to quit all those things.

Daniel Mendelsohn (I have such a crush on him) on translation: 'When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece with phrases like “learning curve,” “stress-related” and “Watch what you say, mister,” he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings. Clytemnestra is not Joan Crawford.' (My mind went to a scary place there.) (Now could Agamemnon, drama queen extraordinaire, be Joan Crawford? Possibly.)

The Atlantic rehashes a 2001 interview with Alice Munro, 2013 Nobel winner (yay!), in which she sounds a lot like Raymond Carver in "Fires":

So why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel. But when I was younger, it was simply a matter of expediency. I had small children, I didn't have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time. I couldn't look ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment something might happen that would take all time away from me. So I wrote in bits and pieces with a limited time expectation. Perhaps I got used to thinking of my material in terms of things that worked that way. And then when I got a little more time, I started writing these odder stories, which branch out a lot. But I still didn't write a novel, in spite of good intentions.

 Also yay! -- the 18th annual Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film festival, featuring a movie about one of my very favourite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. There's also a documentary about Divine, and an adaptation of Michelle Tea's memoir Valencia.

"I heard back from a law firm whose name seemed to come straight out of a Shel Silverstein poem: Solheim, Billing, and Grimmer": it sounds like Shel Silverstein's estate could teach Sylvia Plath's heirs lessons. More seriously, this is another demonstration of the clash between property rights and scholarship. He mentions this Atlantic article on how copyright is making mid-twentieth-century books disappear.

Malcolm Gladwell sucks. Yes, yes he does. I enjoyed a lot of his early New Yorker articles, but oh my GOD, enough with the "You may think X is X. But actually, it's Y!" pop books.

Why is Michiko Kakutani a top literary critic again? Is she better or worse than Dwight Garner? Now there's a real tossup.

Remember Helvetica, one of the best docs ever? The guy who made it is doing a Kickstarter to publish the complete transcripts of his "design trilogy." That sounds pretty damn awesome to me.

Someone's rewritten Hamlet as a Choose Your Own Adventure book!  I used to love those things as a kid. (True to my obsessive nature, I would read them all the way through to figure out how they were structured.) I doubt it's as completely awesome as Robin Johnson's wonderful Hamlet text adventure, tho. (I also have to love Johnson's background image on his Twitter.)

William Todd Schultz on "Why We Can't Get Elliott Smith Out of Our Heads":  "He did it all. There were no limits. That's what great artistic striving is: oceanic." His biography of Elliott, Torment Saint, is very good.

And last, some Rob Brezsny: SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Two years ago, a British man named Sean Murphy decided he had suffered enough from the painful wart on his middle finger. So he drank a few beers to steel his nerves and tried to blast the offending blemish off with a gun. The operation was a success in the sense that he got rid of the wart. It was less than a total victory, though, because he also annihilated most of his finger. May I suggest that you not follow Murphy's lead, Scorpio? Now is a good time to part ways with a hurtful burden, but I'm sure you can do it without causing a lot of collateral damage.

.....oh, FUCK YOU, Rob, LET'S SEE YOU DISENGAGE IF IT'S SO DAMN EASY. ahem.