paper trail

Aug 20, 2012 @ 12:58:00 am

Still from Cosmopolis

Newly released FBI files on Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, corroborate Plath’s pro-Nazi characterization of him in her 1958 poem, “Daddy” ("Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— / Not God but a swastika”) by describing him as “pro-German” with a “morbid disposition."

Ira Glass talks to the New York Times Book Review about what he’s reading—which includes lots of books on the history of Minnesota for an upcoming This American Life episode.

The Village Voice laid off five editorial staffers this week, and more cuts were made across the Village Voice media empire. Does this mean, as Rosie Gray claims at Buzzfeed, that the future of the Voice is imminent?

Galleycat rounds up the writers and poets who inspired Russian punk band Pussy Riot, namely poet Joseph Brodsky and members of the Russian absurdist poetry movement Oberiu.

New studies find that usage of first person pronouns “me” and “I” have increased forty percent in novels between 1960 and 2008, while the use of "you" has jumped an amazing three hundred percent. But what does this mean for fiction? The Atlantic Wire traces the rise of the second-person novel.

Is David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis any good? While it can be “maddening in its slowness, its reliance on dense, hyperstylized dialogue, and its casual dismissal of traditional story structure,” Dana Stevens writes at Slate, “it’s also bracing in its unapologetic engagement with language and ideas.”