weekend links: Big Ears Festival, Famous Deaths, Female Masking
A photo from Daniel Handal's series Female Masking. Image courtesy of Slate.
So much has been written about Prince in the last 24 hours. But Hilton Als’s 2012 “paean 2 Prince” is still one of the best things I’ve read about him. R.I.P., Prince. You’re in heaven now, eating omelets with the angels. [Harpers]
SXSW: out. Big Ears Festival: in. [The New Yorker]
Inspired in part by Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian-language memoir, Tim Parks investigates why some authors choose to write in a non-native language. Some reasons (e.g., trauma) are more compelling than others (e.g., puns). [New York Review of Books]
Austin’s own Katy Horan and Taisia Kitaiskaia are turning their comic “Literary Witches” into a book, slated for a 2017 release by Hachette/Seal. Revisit the comic’s January debut and get excited. [Electric Literature]
Have you ever wondered what John F. Kennedy heard in his final moments? What Whitney Houston smelled in hers? The traveling exhibit Famous Deaths, a collaboration between Dutch scientists and designers, recreates sensory stimuli from the last four minutes of the lives of a few notable people. [Hyperallergic]
Remember The Ring? Remember how the only way to escape the “seven days” curse was to show someone else the creepy video? We’re not saying we think the subjects in Daniel Handal’s photo series Female Masking will crawl out of our computer screens in a week if we don’t share this with you. We’re just saying we think they might. [Slate]
Hey, Austin: come say hi at the New Fiction Confab today! [Facebook]
—Alyssa G. Ramirez