weekend links: Clarice Lispector, unwanted photographs, Twin Peaks pinups
Image courtesy of the Chicago Reader/Jason Lazarus.
Do you ever notice how great, paradigm-changing books are always considered “difficult” in the same predictable ways? Sure, there’s something to be said for “abstruse language games and syntactical tomfoolery,” but let’s take a moment to think about what it would mean to move past the hallmarks of modernism and create a novel that expands the genre in truly unexpected fashion. [Full Stop Quarterly]
Speaking of hallmarks of modernism, here’s a short story from Clarice Lispector, whose work is as fresh and astonishing today as it was 50 years ago. “Report on the Thing” is one of the many pieces that will be included in The Complete Stories, to be published by New Directions next month. [VICE]
Artist Jason Lazarus is trying to create a compendium of photos that cause psychic pain. If you have any Polaroids you’d like to get rid of, feel free to send them his way. [Chicago Reader]
Three months ago we linked you to Jonathan Basile’s virtual Library of Babel (inspired, of course, by the Jorge Luis Borges story). Now, Basile has written a beautiful little essay on life in the Library. [The Paris Review]
The Book of Mormon opens next week in Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital of the world. SLC’s alt weekly is taking this opportunity to reflect on satire; I’m taking this opportunity to suggest you watch Andrew Rannell’s 2012 Tonys performance. It’s so good! [Salt Lake City Weekly]
The Community Artist Collective in Houston is hosting an exciting group show of women artists from the African diaspora. A few of the pieces are on display in this review, along with a great write-up of how the images work with language, memory, and history to present insight into the experiences of these talented artists. [Arts+Culture]
Wayne Alan Brenner has a great roundup of Austin’s arts and culture events this weekend, which is great, because it means that we don’t have to write it for you. Enjoy your weekend with portraits, plays, and, um, bug photography. [Austin Chronicle]
And, just for fun, from the land of the wonderful and strange: Emma Munger drew the men of Twin Peaks as pinups. Isn’t it too dreamy? [Dangerous Minds]
—Alyssa G. Ramirez and Sean Redmond