From the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, a post about Joan Acocella’s recent article about the descriptivist versus prescriptivist grammarian wars, and some sound advice: Don’t go into a bar and ask, “For whom are we rooting today?”
Can you take back poetry? Larkin's and Auden's most well-known lines about love—“What will survive of us is love” and “We must love one another or die”—are anthologized and taught in classrooms all over the world. “But what’s remarkable about them,” Ron Rosenbaum writes at Slate, is that their authors “agonized over them, were conflicted and critical of their own lines. Both Larkin and Auden eventually tried to distance themselves from their original unmediated utterances.”
In honor of former assistant curator Frank O’Hara, the Museum of Modern Art has invited poets Stefania Heim and Wayne Koestenbaum to read O’Hara’s “lunch time” poems during, well, lunch, as part of their Modern Poets series. O’Hara famously used to write poetry during his lunch breaks, now visitors can use theirs to listen to them.
Debut novelist Madeleine Miller has been awarded the last Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel The Song of Achilles, about the love story between Achilles and “exiled princeling” Patroclus. Miller is the fourth debut novelist to win over the past decade, and the fourth consecutive American writer to win the British prize.
For the next week, anybody who “likes” KFC on Facebook is eligible for an unusual reward: an unabridged, downloadable copy of Colonel Sanders’s autobiography. The fried-chicken king’s memoir was discovered in KFC vaults last fall, and was written in 1966, two years after Sanders sold his chicken empire for $2 million. In addition to the Colonel’s life story, Col. Harland Sanders: The Autobiography of the Original Celebrity Chef includes thirty-three previously unpublished recipes.
The Malcolm Gladwell title generator.
