Bukowski’s Last, Unpublished Poem, via Fax
Ploughshares’s oh-so-thorough cheat sheet for all things literary in Los Angeles: "The literary life of Los Angeles is like a newly discovered shortcut or a charming local bistro. You sort of don’t want anyone to know about it for fear it might get ruined…“
Michelle Dean on "Critics Who Explain Things”: “The fact is, ‘harshness’ is a moving target. It means entirely different things to different people. And one line along which it often divides is gender. In retrospect, that a call for being 'less nice’ would begin with a male critic isn’t so surprising: There’s a certain male tint to the perspective that life happens on a level playing field, where reason is always triumphant and a hint of bias is a slag on a good man’s word, so why can’t we go mano-a-mano and all just have at it? Women, for better or worse, don’t have that luxury.”
An excerpt from D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love is a Ghost Story: “Back then—in a letter in which he said for all he cared readers frustrated by his writing were welcome to think he was an asshole—he had made clear that ’[f]iction for me is a conversation for me between me and something that May Not Be Named—God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalitic cathexes, Roqoq’oqu, whomever. I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER—do not regard it as his favor, rather as his choice, that, duly warned, he is expended capital/time/retinal energy on what I’ve done.’”
On the science of self-awareness: “Numerous neuroimaging studies have suggested that thinking about ourselves, recognizing images of ourselves and reflecting on our thoughts and feelings—that is, different forms self-awareness—all involve the cerebral cortex, the outermost, intricately wrinkled part of the brain. The fact that humans have a particularly large and wrinkly cerebral cortex relative to body size supposedly explains why we seem to be more self-aware than most other animals.”
The second digital issue of The Tape went live this past week.
In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Hesse’s death this month: his “Ticino years”:
