weekend links: Tennessee Williams, Sally Mann, decorative rocks
Ralph Eugene Meatyard,
Untitled
(1960).
Photo courtesy of Hyperallergic.
In 1982, Tennessee Williams hired a fan named James Grissom to track down his muses and ask them whether he, and his writing, ever mattered to them. It’s like High Fidelity meets Cyrano de Bergerac, except sadder. Check out an excerpt from Grissom’s recently published memoir. [Longreads]
Cancel your weekend plans: for the first time ever, the Library of Congress is streaming selections from its Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. This week’s releases include readings by Kurt Vonnegut, Audre Lorde, Ray Bradbury, Anne Sexton, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many more. [Library of Congress]
If you’re a writer, you probably have a day job. And you’ve probably longed for a simpler time, when literature—not TV or the Internet—entertained the masses. You would have made it big then, you think. Guess what: you’re probably wrong! Read the cautionary tale of Frances Burney, once the world’s foremost female writer, and the day job that derailed her career. [The Millions]
Sally Mann has been both praised as a brilliant photographer and vilified as a child pornographer for her intimate images of her family, including her small children. In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, she offers a somewhat contradictory and self-congratulatory defense. [New York Times Magazine]
Like Mann, self-taught photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard also produced provocative images of family. From 1958 to 1970, the optician, suburban dad, and Little League coach “staged nightmarish scenarios acted out by family members and populated with disfigured masks, broken mirrors, and dolls.” Meatyard’s work is on display at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. I’m there. [Hyperallergic]
Austin’s Modern Rocks Gallery showcases rock music photography and, um, decorative rocks. The gallery—which was founded by the former guitarist of Modern English, along with his wife—celebrates its first anniversary this weekend with a show featuring never-before-seen photographs of the Smiths. [Austin Monthly]
—Alyssa G. Ramirez