People grow mainstream when they win awards. The Nobel Prize, especially, has a knack for pulling smart and talented people out of their insular cubbyholes and showing them off to a newly interested public. Herta Müller is a prime example of this. Before she won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Müller was a semi-well-known German author, revered by her peers and critics but mostly ignored by American readers. That all changed on October 7th.
From the category archives:
Lit News
“I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.” — From St. Patrick’s Confessio
Okay, you’ve done your penance. Now go drain a Guinness.
by Brian Allen Carr
We have a broken rib. This is the most unfortunate of wounds. Doctors can do nothing for you. Luckily there’s alcohol. Thankfully there is YouTube. We are at our most powerful while watching strangers get wounded.
Check out this sucker.
If you’re bummed you can’t make SXSW this week, so are we. Want to get even more bummed? Read on. This week we put on our street-worn Chuck Taylors and headed over to the festival — you know, virtually. The most important thing to us was seeing where poetry might fit in to this Music, Film & Interactive festival (by the way, according to the SXSW overlords, interactive means “compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology,” by which we’re assuming they mean Twitter). But where is poetry found on Twitter? Why, in a multitude of Twitter movements, of course. You see, these days, Twitter has its own subcultures and isms — just like Slow Food! – that require directions and much explaining from a panel of witty Twitter users who sit around and talk about Slow Twitter — yum.







