TOBI'S DESK

  Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels—knows how awful it feels—when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme goes off the rails for a second because English pronunciation has changed since the time the poem was written. Take a look at this gallery of specimens. Exhibit A: Come live with me and be my love , And we will all the pleasures prove Millions of examples of that. Love rhymed with prove or move . Elizabethan poetry is rife with this. • Exhibit B: A winning wave, deserving note In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoestring in whose tie I see a wild civility . Tie used to be pronounced tee . Read it again and say tee where it says tie . Aha. • Exhibit C: Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What’s roundly smooth or languishingly slow. And praise the easy vigor of a line Where Denham’s strength and Waller’s sweetness join . I don’t know whether Pope pronounced line “loin,” or joi...

On April 3, The Paris Review  will honor Joy Williams  with the  Hadada Award  for lifetime achievement at our annual gala,  the Spring Revel . In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection,  Ninety-Nine Stories of God . One story and illustration will appear each morning this week.   An original illustration by Brad Holland. 44 A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree. The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road. THE INDIVIDUALIST   Joy Williams has published ten stories in  The Paris Review.  Her most recent, “ Flour ,” appears in the  Spring i...

In 1798, an unknown curate named Robert Thomas Malthus published the essay that would give his name to a new breed of anxiety. He argued that the growth rate of the population would always exceed the growth rate of the food supply, inevitably reducing every country to the brink of starvation, and turning the world into a Hieronymus Bosch painting: crowded, chaotic and cruel. It was a unique, and uniquely grim, theory. For centuries, apocalyptic scenarios had been the sole purview of God, the price he would exact in exchange for sorting out our souls. Malthus demonstrated that not only did humanity possess the divine’s capacity for destruction, but also that the engine of this destruction could be as innocent an act as procreation. Friedrich Engels , joining a chorus of criticism, called it “the most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and world citizenship.” I wonder if Malthus knew he had di...

We are barely through the first quarter of 2018, and we already have a long list of new African novels to read. Chuma Nwokolo’s Extinction of Menai was published on the 7th of March, the same month that saw the publication of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil, and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2DZhjJL

  Perhaps the most striking images in Oliver Munday’s new monograph, Don’t Sleep (Rizzoli, March 2018), appear just before the title page. On the left-facing page is a nineteenth-century map of the Senate floor. On the page opposite is an illustrated cross section of the hull of a slave ship, scaled to the same size as the Senate and in the exact same semicircle shape. This encapsulates Munday’s design work: arresting juxtapositions, an engagement with the political, and above all, a deliberate, understated presence. As heavy as the visuals are, Munday’s hand is light. The images speak for themselves. Don’t Sleep is a powerful survey of thirty-three-year-old Munday’s career thus far. The title, which asks readers to stay alert to the implicit and explicit messages of an image-saturated culture, also calls to mind “wokeness.” Though Munday is hesitant to call himself an activist, he readily acknowledges the role of design in various social movements, from May 1968 to Cold War C...

The 10th annual International Dylan Thomas Prize  has announced their 2018 shortlist. Open to all nations, the prize is awarded to authors under the age of 39 who write in English. The “female dominant” shortlist includes six writers (four of which are debut authors). The 2018 shortlist includes: Kumukanda  by  Kayo Chingonyi Her Body and Other Parties  by  Carmen Maria Machado  ( Our   interview with Machado  and our review ) First Love  by  Gwendoline Riley Conversations With Friends  by  Sally Rooney  ( The Millions’  review) Idaho  by  Emily Ruskovich My Absolute Darling   by  Gabriel Tallent The winner will be announced on May 10, 2018. The post 2018 International Dylan Thomas Shortlist appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2uqv0l9

Fiona Mozley , the author of Man Booker shortlisted and Dylan Thomas Prize longlisted Elmet , wrote her debut novel while travelling between Peckham, in South London, and her nine to six job in Central London. She missed the landscape of northern England, which is where she grew up and where Elmet is set. Jotting down notes on her smartphone and laptop, she attempted to evoke this landscape during her daily commute, allowing a temporary respite from the daily grind. Though we seldom see people writing on trains, many commuters read or browse aimlessly on their smartphones. Emily St. John Mandel , staff writer of The Millions, spoke of her subway writing habit in “ Writing on Trains .” “With a combined total of six hours spent on a subway a week, it felt like extra time,” she says. Mandel sought out other writers who wrote on trains, including memoirist Julie Klam and novelist Joe Wallace . Klam appreciated the need to beat the clock and get down thoughts before her station, as oppo...

Hans Haacke, “News,” 1969/2018. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (installation view)   On the top floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a printer is printing the news. As the printer groans and stutters, long loops of paper gather on the gallery floor. It prints slowly, pausing every few minutes, as the paper grows into an endless ribbon over the course of a day. From a distance, it looks like a recycling heap. Close up, it looks like a Tara Donovan sculpture or the graceful curls of intricate origami. There are RSS feeds coming in from all over the world, in English: Reuters , the Guardian , Al Jazeera , the New York Times , Haaretz , Der Spiegel , Fox News , the Times of India , others. You’re invited to pick it up and read it. “Legendary Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker, 84, reveals he survived bite from poisonous spider.” “Anthea Hamilton review—gourds move in mysterious ways at Tate Britain.” “Detroit-area girl, 3, wounded after AK-47 accidenta...

On April 3, The Paris Review  will honor Joy Williams  with the  Hadada Award  for lifetime achievement at our annual gala,  the Spring Revel . In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection,  Ninety-Nine Stories of God . One story and illustration will appear each morning this week. Original illustration by Brad Holland   3 A noted humanist was invited to take part in a discussion about the dangers and opportunities that would arise if intelligent life forms on other planets were discovered. His remarks, though no one disagreed with them, became so heated that the pro- ducers later, in light of what had happened, decided to edit him out of the program. There was consensus that discovering intelligent life forms on other planets was probable and even essential to the human endeavor, but much of the conversation concerned whether any life form discovered would hold a ca...

1. On January 29, the Olympic torch relay for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics passed through Chuncheon in Gungwon Province. The last time I had really paid attention to the Olympics was when my family took me to Beijing nearly a decade ago. This year my eye alighted on the event not for the promise of feats of athleticism or sportsmanship, but on the last torchbearer of the day, the promotional ambassador from South Korea, the actor Jang Keun-suk . In 2009 I was 16 years old, and early in the winter and into the better part of spring, I was hooked on the South Korean drama You’re Beautiful. A 16-episode television series that gained international cult status, spawned remakes in Japan and Taiwan, and briefly popularized the sale of a hybrid “pig-rabbit” stuffed animal that appears in the series, the storyline follows a young nun-in-training (played by Park Shin-hye ) who is forced to disguise her identity and pretend to be male in a popular boy-band-slash-idol-group, A.N.JELL, cohabit...