Martin Parr. USA. Atlanta. The Georgia Street Fair. Twins with sweet-covered apples.
1. The Oxford American, once again, has a fantastic essay mixing memoir, the mystery of art, and the deeper currents of how the two can mix and make life itself fat and sweet and wonderful with significance. The piece is on OutKast. Yes, that OutKast, and The Oxford American, simply put, has the freshest ad most authentic voice on art these days, period.
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/702-da-art-of-storytellin
2. Morten Høi Jensen's tribute to Clive James is one of the best essays the LARB has published:
"He doesn’t just tell you about a book he’s read — he tells you where he bought it, what year it was published, and what condition it was in. Despite now being in his late 70s, he still has the air of the student about him, and often happily evokes his undergraduate days in Sydney or early years as a book reviewer on Grub Street in London. He is in perpetual harangue with these younger selves, sometimes modifying their opinions or even challenging them. But the true lover’s protective instinct has never waned, and the student in James can be mercilessly (and sometimes wearily) impatient with his more dutiful elders (usually literary academics and theorists). “You can’t help wondering why it is thought to be good that the study of literature should so tax the patience,” he once wrote in an essay on the literary scholar Wayne C. Booth. “After all, literature doesn’t. Boring you rigid is just what literature sets out not to do.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-lightning-before-death-a-tribute-to-clive-james
3. Sometimes it is good to be angry. I find, that in times of trouble, that one of my favorite angry men is Charles Simic. I find, that in times of calm, that one of my favorite poets, is Charles Simic:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/04/sticking-to-our-guns/
4. Guy Davenport is among my favorite writers, and even brief clips of writing in his journals are enough to keep on going intellectually for long periods of time. I am still disappointed that I never got around to reviewing his recently published collected writings. Happily, The Paris Review has a few of those aforementioned clips, reprinted here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/23/culture-is-a-wonderful-fiction/
5. Jeffery Toobin's accounts of the Supreme Court and its history are level headed, dispassionate, and always written very well. His writing, in an of itself, finds a living constitution rather than one set in un-evolving statutes, so conservatives must not like him at all. That said, he seems to show what actually occurs on the court (a mixture of beliefs and views of precedents), how perceptions change, and his brief piece on the second amendment is great example:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/so-you-think-you-know-the-second-amendment?mbid=social_facebook
Video of the Week:
6. This OutKast song was special to me many, many years before Kiese Laymon reminded me in the article above. I remember the first time I heard it, the song was completely devastating in its range of emotions and its ability to pivot from one emotion to the next without fanfare, a consistent beat in the background, each moment capable of horror, joy, and redemption. Kind of like life, I thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0tamp9XdqU
Poem for the Week:
7. It is hard to believe that OutKast can take you to Shakespeare and a mediation on form, but that is exactly what is happening with me this morning. At times, I feel the necessity for rigor of meter and rhyme and this necessity usually comes from rap music. There is something in how a tight and consistent beat can hold you together, make life seem unified in its everyday-ness, in the consistency of its micro changes and its banality. Stories and words exist slightly above and beyond that beat, but are beholden to it: individual lives are small in relation to arching and looming forces. It is little wonder that Shakespeare found such profundity and power from keeping his form tight. He offers the same truth that Outkast does. In other words, on this Monday morning, why not Sonnet 60:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174362