Tag Archives: Prufrock

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Publishing

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

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One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Reading

What Can Be Gained from Translated Works?

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Benjamin Moser talks about finding a somewhat old library of English books and how he began to change his opinion of translating world authors into English.

In recent years we have seen writers outside English become global phenomena: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami. But such a literary life, the popularity owed to translation, began to seem a little fake to me. And when I read Mizumura I found myself agreeing that, strictly speaking, literary universality does not exist. The books I loved were, after all, about something, not everything. But even in practical and commercial terms, the prominence of English created more losers than winners, favoring, like so many other forms of globalization, a handful of instantly recognizable and inoffensive brands. 

…

Translation — not the thing but the unquestioned emphasis on its virtue — started to feel to me like another philistinism masquerading as worldliness.

By worldliness, Moser means people travel the world–or read from around the world–and they start to think they own the place.

Micah Mattix discusses the essay in the latest Prufrock email, saying maybe readers or literary opinion makers should lighten up a bit. “A healthy curiosity is a virtue, of course, but there is nothing wrong with enjoying a work on its own.”

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction

Modern Trauma, The Song of Roland, and Sci-Fi Realities

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Micah Mattix is back with the new Prufrock newsletter. Subscribe and read higher. Today’s email links to an essay about trauma being a product of our modern age. From that essay, “Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.”

Hierarchies in Space: Alexander Hellene writes about boring, fantasy bureaucracies in science fiction. “Captain Kirk is the ultimate pulp hero, a man of action and passion who takes his duty to his crew so seriously he is consistently willing to die for them. Does this sound like a guy who could function on the society of the future dreamed up by Gene Rodenberry, et al.? No wonder Kirk wants to be in space all the time.”

Snapping is crazy fast, researchers at Georgia Tech have concluded, and that means Thanos could never have done that snappy thing he did. Fact-checkers for the win!

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great French poem “The Song of Roland” on BBC4’s In Our Time.

World Magazine’s next issue is their 2021 books edition.

Photo: Modern Diner on Dexter Avenue, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 1978.  John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.