Morrissey has won the UK’s annual Bad Sex Award with his otherwise un-garlanded first novel, List of the Lost. The scene that helped him beat out competition from the likes of Joshua Cohen and Erica Jong involves “a giggling snowball of full-figured copulation,” a “clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation”, and a “bulbous salutation,” though it’s unclear whether these were so arranged as to take full advantage of the rhyme.
There’s some more likable rhyming to be found near the end of Susan Bernofsky’s lovely tribute to Christopher Middleton, the poet and translator of Robert Walser, among others, who died late last week.
And Mikhail Baryshnikov declaims lines from his late friend Joseph Brodsky’s poetry in his new one-man show (which has been called an “anti-ballet”), Brodsky / Baryshnikov.
Vogue asked Hilton Als to curate a show of photographs for its Gallery, and he chose to take as his starting point Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still, which, as he says, “describes those forces—parents, nanny, landscape—that contributed to the making of Mann’s eye, the hard romance that informs the pictures.”
Editorial staffers at the Huffington Post are asking their bosses to recognize their union.
Next week at Columbia, philosopher Alain Badiou will be giving a talk in English entitled “Identity and Universality: A Lecture in Light of Contemporary Tragic Events in Paris and Elsewhere.”