by Ann Marie Thornburg
When I recently discovered the blog 50 Watts, I fell in love instantly. The website is an exhaustive collection of book-related art and design. For someone who loves to think about the minds-eye landscapes of writers, and who also loves to get lost in the beautiful, wacky, colorful, and, above all, the inventive work of visual artists, this blog, curated by the brilliant Will Schofeld, is the ultimate feast. It is a lovely reminder of how the written and visual can work together. Neither plays a mere supporting role; instead, each medium nourishes the other in a meaningful kind of give-and-take. I encourage you to visit 50 Watts and see which pieces of book-candy tempt you the most!
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by Joshua Edwards
Lynn and I are visiting a friend in Rome, a seriously weird place…
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by Joshua Edwards
(A Short Manifesto in Support of New Efforts)
I was out all day with friends playing basketball and eating Ethiopian food, and I also managed my fantasy baseball teams and watched My So-Called Life. And now I am in such a great mood, surrounded by my books, having done my taxes, Lynn sleeping in the other room, and I think of the limits of learning and its affects on poetic sensibility. Where will poetry go? What must it do? I sit in silence at my messy desk upon which is placed a port of access to all the world and what it’s capable of throwing at its actors.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
Welcome to the end of news, or at least the end of news as I know it. This week the New York Times introduced digital subscriptions for US readers of the Times online, a move which the paper has been planning for at least two years. Starting Monday, March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com, as well as users of the Time’s smartphone and tablet apps, will be limited to 20 discrete page views per month. That’s 20 slideshows, articles or videos—20 clicks!
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by Joshua Edwards
Headlines cycling. War, officially-forgotten diseases, hot-shot bailouts, shameless status updating, neglected continents, orchestral indie pop grandeur, absurd year-end best-of lists. It was not a good 12-month stretch for most ideals, people, or animals, it seems. I’ve spent some time thinking of possible names for this past year, and the one that rings truest is “Deepwater Horizon.” What a beautiful, grandiose construction of such simple terms. How snugly it fits our dreams gone awry, our hope misremembered! It would make a fine vintage for a Château Mouton Rothschild, perhaps best enjoyed while eating hors d’oeuvres on the set of the next James Bond film. But enough about the past and its attendant regrets. Instead of a backward glance, I’d like to speculate on the coming year, and I’ll do this with the aid of an online version of the I Ching (which I predict will enjoy a resurgence in 2011, among younger American poets at least). Below are some questions I’m curious about, followed by enticing excerpts from the I Ching replies (Richard Wilhelm translation into German translated by Cary F. Baynes into English, 1950) and my (ridiculous) extrapolations.
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