“Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.” The full transcript of Sheila Heti’s interview with Joan Didion is now online.
If the blog network Tumblr were a city, it would have 42 million residents. And cities, of course, need newspapers. To accommodate their growing population, Tumblr is creating a “news site for the things that happen in the Tumblrverse,” and has already hired two media vets to edit it.
A former Harper’s Bazaar intern has filed suit against the magazine for allegedly forcing her to work forty to fifty-five hours a week without pay. “The case poses philosophic and economic challenges not just for the publishing industry but for an overall economy in which more and more businesses are using interns,” writes PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts. In other news, the Associated Press has reinstated its internship program after a yearlong hiatus.
Never mind the literary luminaries: Stephen King, Erica Jong, and Tom Clancy populate David Foster Wallace’s list of his top ten favorite writers.
“As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not? Would Turkey lose any grandeur?” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in response to Paul Auster’s announcement that he will not visit Turkey to protest the country’s recent persecution of journalists.
Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Syzmborska died on Wednesday at home in Krakow. The eighty-eight year old published her first book of poems in 1952, and her most recent collection, Home, was released in the U.S. in 2008. “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” Syzmborska once told an interviewer.
