Why Does This Photo Exist?
If you’re scouring the Internet for Tiger Woods news, you came to the wrong place. The paparazzi are moaning like Benjy Compson. And we don’t like golf. Golf epitomizes the economic bubble: wheeling and dealing, everyone getting in. Al Czerviks are the norm and not the exception. We’re all for egalitarianism and Horatio Alger, but we don’t want people getting hurt like we’re seeing. And now they’re hurting us — the recession is affecting LSU Press and the Southern Review (DSM’s Noted Abroad correspondent, Charlie Geer, has graced the latter’s pages). Sometimes “they” tell us to go back to school when we’re unemployed. We say make sure you were employed in the first place. But don’t talk to us, we avoided graduate school. Instead ask Alexander Chee. Colum McCann used another crisis as the foundation for Let the Great World Spin, and the conservative writer David Gelernter survived the Unabomber. But he’ll not let mere survival dictate his identity. Finally, we have a less well known crisis: the Kansas La Belle Ferronnière. Fore! – Andrew Geer
– For seventy-five years Louisiana State University (LSU), in Baton Rouge, has been home to two of the country’s most storied literary institutions, LSU Press and the Southern Review. Books published by the press—including, most famously, John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous best-seller, A Confederacy of Dunces—have won four Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the Man Booker Prize, among others; the press’s poetry list has long been among the strongest in the nation. The Southern Review, which was cofounded by Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and others in 1935, has since nurtured—and often launched—the careers of several generations of important writers — Southern Review and LSU Press in Poets and Writers
Is It Worth It?
– In college, I had two writing teachers with opposing views of the MFA: Annie Dillard urged me to go right away, and Kit Reed said don’t go, in fact never go, get a job, preferably a magazine job, and just write. I tried Kit’s advice first, which appealed to the loner contrarian I was back then. And so in the time between when I graduated college and when I applied, I moved to San Francisco, took a job in a bookstore and got a cheap apartment with two friends. I found an internship at Out/Look, the journal of LGBT studies and culture, and helped organize Out/Write, the first national LGBT writers conference in San Francisco. – MFAs in The Nervous Breakdown
– On a gray morning in August 1974, a man stepped off the edge of the yet-to-be completed World Trade Center and into history. That morning, Philippe Petit crossed a wire stretched between the towers eight times. He danced, ran and lay down, performing for the crowd that had gathered more than 100 stories below his feet, before dismounting into the custody of New York police officers. — Colum McCann on NPR
He Only Made Gelernter Stronger
– On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. Watson Hall on the campus of Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. “Can you know something you don’t know you know?” he asks the small group of students enrolled in a course called “Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda,” which, according to the syllabus, explores how cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind can distinguish “seeming from being” and locate “a man’s (or your own) identity.” — David Gelernter in The Chronicle of Higher Education
– At some point in the next year, a private collector’s $20 million lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board is expected to go to trial in the Federal District Court in Manhattan. The plaintiff, Joe Simon-Whelan, is accusing the authentication board – and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which runs it – of “engaging in a conspiracy to restrain and monopolise trade in the market for Warhol works” – in part, by denying the authenticity of works owned by collectors like Simon-Whelan. — Art Connoisseurship in The National
Video: Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger
