Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t meditate. She doesn’t believe in self-care, wellness, or mindfulness. They are coercive, exploitative, and futile. We are not in charge of ourselves... Ich Imrich what will be will be ...
They've been awarding the Franz Kafka Prize, an international author-prize, since 2001 -- Philip Roth was the first winner -- and they've now announced that this year's winner is ... Ivan Wernisch; see, for example, the report at thePrague Daily Monitor, Czech poet Wernisch to receive Franz Kafka Prize this year
For all its international aspirations, the prize does seem to lean a bit to the hometown writers -- Wernisch is the fifth Czech winner, of eighteen awarded -- but it's hard to complain too much about the previous ones (Ivan Klíma, Arnošt Lustig, Václav Havel, and Daniela Hodrová), so he's probably worth checking out -- which is easier said than done in English: In the Puppet Gardens, published by Michigan Slavic Publications (!) looks to be the only vaguely available translated title; see the publicity page, or get your copy atAmazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon, 1926, translated by Simon Watson Taylor. A Surrealist novel, in some sense, although I do not understand what use there might be in calling this a novel. The book contains a short preface that I did not understand; a hundred-page tour of the shops in a covered passage, destroyed just after Aragon wrote the piece, that is a classic of Paris flaneuring; another bit of wandering in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, this time at night, and accompanied by André Breton; and a final manifesto-like piece that I did not understand.
The root of Surrealism (“offspring of frenzy and darkness,” p. 65 of the 1994 Exact Change edition) is realism, right? Aragon is at one of the hairdressers in the Passage de l’Opera. He is rhapsodizing on the subject of blond hair:
The root of Surrealism (“offspring of frenzy and darkness,” p. 65 of the 1994 Exact Change edition) is realism, right? Aragon is at one of the hairdressers in the Passage de l’Opera. He is rhapsodizing on the subject of blond hair:
What is blonder than the froth of moss? I have often though I saw champagne on the floor of forests. And chanterelles! And agaric! Darting hares! The moons of fingernails! The colour pink! The blood of plants! The eyes of bitches! Memory: memory is truly blond. (p. 40)
What Makes A Great Magazine Editor
One striking feature in a number of editorships is the manner in which editorial practice shifts towards a more charismatic and singular mode over time. This is certainly a common feature for three of the most successful literary editors of the twentieth century, each of whom edited a long-running publication that was firmly embedded in a parent institution.
The Secret To Becoming A Great Writer? Don’t Have Kids
The Secret To Becoming A Great Writer? Don’t Have Kids
‘Pre-Gutenberg’ – How Poet Anna Akhmatova Made Sure Her ‘Requiem’ Would Survive Stalin’s Reign Of Terror
“Akhmatova knew that the secret police might search her apartment and find her writings, so she burnt the paper on which composed drafts of the poem, after learning it by heart. But what if she were arrested and executed? To ensure the survival of her poem, she taught it to her closest female friends who would remember the poem after her own death. She called this situation ‘pre-Gutenberg’ because state terror had forced her and other underground writers to live as if the printing press had never been invented.”
At What Age Do We Lose The Ability To Really Master A New Language?
“The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is – at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted,” researchers concluded that the cutoff is later than many experts thought.