Saturday, August 30, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
Beyoncé Wrote A Poem, Sort Of
Queen B’s contribution to the fifth issue of CR Fashion Book is about Blue Ivy and being a “healing light.”
Beyoncé has a spread in this month's CR Fashion Book, which showcases photos alongside a poem called "Bey The Light." (CR is former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld's new magazine.)
Pierre Debusschere / CR Fashion Book
The poem is credited as having "words by Beyoncé," as "remixed" by poet Forrest Gander. The poem was created from an interview Beyoncé gave to Dominic Teja Sidhu and Christopher Bartley.
Pierre Debusschere/CR Fashion Book
"I took the interview and, keeping close to her original language, but sometimes altering it for formal reasons, juxtaposed selected phrases to create a rhythm that I felt expresses the almost stark sincerity of Beyoncé's tone in the interview."
Pierre Debusschere/CR Fashion Book
27 Books Parents Should Read To Their Kids Before They Grow Up
How Many Great Non-Superhero Graphic Novels Have You Read?
There’s a lot more to comics than spandex and superpowers.
13 SciFi Books That Would Only Be Written In The First World
28 Signs You're The Tyrion Lannister Of Your Friend Group
The best things come in small packages.
Some may say you have delusions of grandeur.
HBO / Via bula.ie
But as far as you're concerned, they're not delusions.
HBO / Via degrassi.wikia.com
Backhanded compliments are the only type of compliments.
HBO / Via fanpop.com
But when you need to charm, you can really turn it on.
HBO / Via fanpop.com
DREAM ON UNTIL YOUR DREAMS COMES TRUE
Your Favourite Songs Are Now Amazing Shakespearian Sonnets
Kickin’ it like it’s 1595. How many of these Pop Sonnets can you guess?
5 Poems From "Prelude To Bruise" Read By Saeed Jones
These poems leave bruises. And you’ll love them.
Prelude to Bruise
"I like my black boys broke, or broken."
"When I finally wrote this poem, I had been thinking about the words “black” and “blue” for months. I’d say them over and over again to myself, repeating and re-arranging them to see how they sounded. The pairing of these two particular colors is, of course, loaded with meanings. It applies violence and the aftermath, the bruising. And I was interested in the idea of bruises being physical memories.
So, I had all of these ideas swarming in my brain but no poem to show for it until I heard Mark Doty read a poem about bootblacks. The moment I heard him say “bootblack” which sounds an like echo of “blue-black,” I bolted up in my seat. That night, I sat down at my desk, saying the names of cities that start with a “B.” When I got to Birmingham, it all came together. That’s how most of these poems happen. I obsess over words or sounds or images until there’s a breakthrough that brings all of them together. Birmingham, AL is such a potent symbol of the troubled history of race in America, setting a poem about bootblacks and blue-black bodies there just seemed like the culmination of everything I was trying to do. I wrote the poem very quickly while saying say it out loud, line by line. I was afraid that if I thought about it for too long, it would fall apart in my hands.
As for the scene described in the poem itself, well... The poem isn't autobiographical, thankfully, but the first time a man said "nigger" to my face, it was in the middle of having sex."
"Don't Let The Sun Set On You"
"YOU BETTER RUN // IF YOU CAN READ // THIS SIGN."
"This is a found poem constructed entirely out of words and phrases from a 2006 Washington Post article about sundown towns. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1968, there were hundreds of towns across the country with billboards stating the people of color had to leave the town by sundown. One sign said “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In—“ and then it would have the name of the town. The history of sundown towns is understandably shocking and, I think, hard to imagine were even possible. But they were very common. Levvitown — the first suburban development in America — was a sundown town.
And since Prelude To Bruise is about personal journeys as well as the collision of history and identity, I felt it was important to consider the various dangers and realities in the midst of staking a claim to our life. In my mind, the poem is about a black man driving through rural Kentucky just before sunset. Where will he go? Can he find a motel where it’s safe to stay? What if he runs out of gas?
Recently, as I was reading about the enforced curfews in Ferguson, the poem took on another shade of meaning. An essential question in this collection is "How far have I come?" And the events in Ferguson certainly make me wonder how far have we come from the era of sundown towns."
Mercy
"Her ghost slips into the room wearing nothing but the memory / of a song..."
"My mother had a fatal heart attack the night before Mother’s Day in 2011. The experience of losing her broke me down. I quit my job teaching high school English and pretty much locked myself in my apartment for a while, writing poems and crying hysterically. One morning, I woke up with tear streaks dried on my face. I think I’d been crying in my sleep which my mother herself used to do.
Right before she passed away, I was teaching my 12th grade students Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. At one point in the novel, a grieving mother walks toward her child’s casket hollering out “Mercy!” over and over again. I didn’t really understand that moment in the book until I was grieving myself. The poem is about a speaker realizing the person most capable of comforting him is also the person he has lost."
Anthracite
“...in this town everything born black / also burns.”
"“Anthracite” is a lyrical origin story that, in my mind, sets the events of the book in motion. All of the themes that we see throughout Prelude To Bruise are here: the blues, journeys, the body, vulnerability, danger and, of course, the threat of violence. Reincarnation is referenced in the poem too — "Which of your lives is this?" — because it's a journey in which we have to transform in order to keep moving forward.
Also, I thought it’d just be so cool to have a black man literally fall from the sky and land in the middle of a cotton field! In my mind, this beautiful, strange man has no idea where he is so he also doesn’t understand the history and culture of the place he’s landed in. I feel like one aspect of experiencing racism is the sense of being startled by it, the shock of brutality. This man has no idea what he’s up against and, in fact, his beauty is only going to make life more dangerous for him."
Thursday, August 28, 2014
10 Things That Happen When You Can't Put Down A Good Book
Please do not disturb.
You lose track of time. Day turns to night; you don't budge.
Nathan W. Pyle / Via buzzfeed.com
The next day you're exhausted but still refuse to quit.
Nathan W. Pyle / Via buzzfeed.com
You're late for work because your devotion has disrupted your morning routine.
Nathan W. Pyle / Via buzzfeed.com
Then you miss your stop because it just got SO GOOD.
Nathan W. Pyle / Via buzzfeed.com
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
8 Things We Learned About Deborah Harkness And The "All Souls" Trilogy
An inside look at the final chapter of an incredible science fiction-fantasy trilogy.
Deborah Harkness has brought the world of A Discovery of Witches back to life with the third book in the trilogy, The Book of Life. This truly spans the geeky realms with witches and vampires, time travel, and science labs all thrown together in pursuit of one ancient book. Here are a few things we learned after sitting down to talk about the trilogy's final installment:
The Stories Behind Some Of Music's Most Iconic Photos
Deborah Feingold has shot everyone from Madonna and Prince to Joey Ramone and the Beastie Boys. Here, she talks about the unforgettable images from her new book, Music .
Photograph by Matt McGinley
For more than 30 years, photographer Deborah Feingold has been capturing the spirit of music's biggest names, from Madonna to James Brown to Prince. What started as a hobby, learning to develop prints in darkrooms when she was just 12 years old, quickly turned into a successful career shooting New York's jazz stars, and eventually rap icons and pop divas.
"I've shot everything there is, including food," Feingold told BuzzFeed. "I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different stuff. But if I was going to do a book, this was the book I wanted to do." Feingold's first, Music, a collection of her favorite photographs of musicians, will be released on Sept. 30 via Damiani Books.
The book is Feingold's first photo anthology, and she says she realized her desire to pull it together with the help of one of her younger assistants. "He was like, 'You've got something really special here. You were there at a lot of people's beginnings of their career and a lot of different areas of music.' [I went,] 'You're absolutely right.'"
In anticipation of Music's release, Feingold shared nine photos from the book, as well as eight rarely seen outtakes (including a photo of her taken by Prince) with BuzzFeed.
Madonna in 1982.
Photograph by Deborah Feingold
I only had 12 frames. When I had asked to shoot her, I had called up a couple of publications because it was a smaller world then. [David Keats] was one of the editors at Star Hits magazine and I asked if I could shoot her for it and he said sure. It was just me and a young woman who was assisting me, we shot in my apartment.
There was no makeup artist — she came ready to go. There was no stylist. I have no explanation why I served a bowl of bubblegum and lollipops. She came in and we worked for 20 minutes and she left. It was just two working girls, staying focused, doing it.
John Grisham Accepted Stephen King’s ALS Ice Bucket Challenge In This Video
Grisham calls King his “former friend…who’s now just a mere acquaintance.”
After Stephen King nominated John Grisham for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the best-selling author responded to his "former friend" with this video.
Grisham agreed to do the "ice bucket thing," as he called it.
Via youtube.com
And even left a cigar in his mouth while his son-in-law poured ice on his head.
Via youtube.com
Now Grisham has nominated Tony La Russa, former manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, to take part in the challenge.
Via youtube.com
13 Breakup Poems That Say It Better Than You Ever Could
The Twitter hashtag movement #breakuppoetry parodied classic poems by making them about split relationships. Here are some of the best ones.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Missing — And Finding — The Magic Of Haruki Murakami
The incredibly popular Japanese writer just released his latest book in English. It’s a departure for him, and for me. (Minor spoilers, insofar as a Murakami book can be spoiled.)
Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
When I picked up my first book by Haruki Murakami, somewhere around the start of high school, I did not expect to like it. He writes the exact opposite of what I tend to read. I'm drawn to essays full of sharp observations and overflowing with feelings; I go for wry female writers and long, nonfictional sentences peppered with a lot of commas. Murakami writes fiction that is spare and mild. Rather than planting his feet firmly in reality, he lets talking cats and rifts in the space-time continuum brush up against his otherwise aggressively normal characters. I've read nearly all of his books over the past decade yet I can't so much as recount their plots to anyone who asks — it's too hazy, too personal, too much like trying to describe a dream once you've had your coffee. But at 14 I tore through the slim, strange volume that is After Dark and he's been my favorite writer ever since.
What I was responding to was the remarkable-at-least-to-me idea that you could be alone without being lonely. I was a nerdy, obsessive teenager, and Murakami provided a template for introspection that felt downright revolutionary. His books are odysseys, most of which follow similar blueprints. A character, usually a quiet and solitary man, meets somebody or finds something or receives a strange phone call, and before they know it they're tossed from their simple life into a winding, harrowing journey.
In the process, these characters tend to learn something about themselves; they solve long-dormant mysteries from their own pasts or open their hearts to deeply unexpected people. They're not rich but they don't lack for money, their apartments are tidy, and they enjoy jazz, Wild Turkey, and occasionally conversing with well-dressed prostitutes. There is a lot of sex and sometimes the descriptions thereof can make your skin crawl. But mostly there is a quietness and a strength to the way Murakami's characters make their way through the world he's drawn for them. They don't question their missions for long — the philosophy being that if something's in front of you then you may as well just do it.
I read those books so many times: Sputnick Sweetheart and A Wild Sheep Chase while I was finishing high school and figuring out where to head next; Norwegian Wood and The Elephant Vanishes during an especially lonely, relationship-less patch; Kafka on the Shore in the dining hall of the small college that became the only place for me. I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle over the course of long train rides back and forth between home and school and New York City, and when I finally moved to an apartment after subletting and squatting for months after graduating, about half of the 20 or so books that I brought were by Murakami. Even alone, or searching, or uncertain, he was there with me.
What made him stick was this central thesis, crackling throughout all of his books, that your own inner life is something worth devoting time and energy to. This is true even if you are — as his characters near-uniformly seem to be — totally average, at least on the surface. These odd adventures they had were a way of making their emotions legible, and so they helped me start to name mine. Because that's the real fantasy: What if you could revisit your old confusion, your sorrow, your trauma, and wend your way back through to its core? What if it could be made physical, the inward quest turned outward?
Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
There were no parallel universes in my small Boston suburb, or on the campus of my not-quite-upstate New York college. There were no reclusive men dressed as sheep, nor were there abrupt phone calls that whisked me across the world. There was, though, uncertainty, and a burgeoning case of anxiety, and bouts of loneliness. There were fights with great friends and misunderstandings with family and a few deaths that came much too soon. Reading thousands of pages of characters making their way through not-dissimilar struggles, aided and hampered by an element of Murakami's magical realism, buffered me and helped me see more clearly. Look, he seemed to be saying, here is how you mourn, here is how you sift back through what's happened to you, and look again, there is still a small bit of wonder.
And so his latest book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Many Years of Pilgrimage, came as something of a shock. (A quiet, slow shock, because that is how Murakami does everything.) There is no magic in it, no thresholds into alternate universes. His usual MO — rendering a character's emotional journey as a physical, fantastical one — falls away here, leaving only ordinary Tsukuru Tazaki to muddle through his past on his own. On the first page, we learn that at the age of 20 he was dumped by an incredibly close-knit group of friends and that his life essentially stopped there. Two decades later he's fine, with a decent job and a promising third date, but he's never been able to shake exactly what went wrong in that friend circle.
The book catalogs his painful, halting attempts to find out, with no talking animals to guide him. There is one moment when Tsukuru recalls listening to a story told by a friend from the past, one that the friend's father had recounted to him, that contains a hint of something otherworldly, but only there, shrouded beneath layers of recollection, is even so much as an occult glimmer. A friend, not-quite-jokingly on Twitter, described the book as "normcore."
I know that Murakami is so much more than his magic. His memoir about ultramarathons, What We Talk About When We Talk About Running, is a spectacular sideways look into how we create and operate, and his collection of interviews from the aftermath of the Tokyo subway gas attacks (Underground) lingered with me for weeks after I read it. He can take any topic imaginable, it seems, and imbue it with both weightiness and wonder. But the lack of fancy in Colorless Tsukuru made reading it a tougher, darker experience than I'd bargained for. Lately the anxiety that reared up in college has been back with its claws out, ripping holes in nearly everything — my job, my relationship — that I love and identify with. It's been hard to restrict my dry-heaving panic attacks to the inside of my apartment but it's even harder to feel alone, to feel like my brain has seized control of my body without a warning or an exit. When I received the book in the mail, I tucked into it like I was starving.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
17 Wonderful Melbourne Bookstores Every Book Lover Must Visit
Because you can never have too many books.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Reader's Feast Bookstore, 162 Collins Street Melbourne
At this aptly named gem, all the books face out from the shelves so you can digest their covers and gobble them up as you please.
Jenna Guillaume / BuzzFeed
Jenna Guillaume / BuzzFeed
25 Superhero Graphic Novels To Binge Read Right Now
Just A Few Modern Classics.
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man Vol 1 (by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli)
What It's About: In the Marvel Ultimate Universe, Peter Parker is dead. Miles Morales takes over the Spider-mantle in one of the best superhero origin stories ever told.
Why You Should Read It: REMEMBER WHEN DONALD GLOVER WANTED TO BE SPIDER-MAN AND HOW AWESOME THAT WOULD'VE BEEN!?
Marvel / Via thebendisageofcomics.tumblr.com
Young Avengers: Style>Substance (by Keiron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie)
What It's About: Queer teen superheroes saving the multiverse from the world's worst mother and instagramming the whole thing along the way.
Why You Should Read It: Jamie McKelvie is your new comic book artist crush and every character he draws is your new comic book character crush. Also, Noh-Varr's abs.
Marvel / Via goodcomics.comicbookresources.com
The Joker (by by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo)
What It's About: Heavily influenced by Heath Ledger's Joker performance, this crime-noir comic shows The Joker being released from Arkham Asylum and seeking revenge on former co-horts like The Penguin, Two-Face, and The Riddler.
Why You Should Read It: The Joker has never been more terrifying.
DC Comics / Via blog.thelondonvandal.com
X-Men: Messiah Complex (by Ed Brubaker, Marc Silvestri, and various other writers and artists)
What It's About: The first new mutant baby is born since M-day. The race is on to find her before Mr. Sinister and nearly every other X-Men villain can find her first. This story sets the stage for a lot of the current X-Men runs.
Why You Should Read It: Lady Deathstrike and X-23 is the fight you didn't know you needed to see. AND IT'S ALL THE X-MEN FIGHTING TOGETHER SO LIKE...
Marvel / Via buzzcomics.net
This Is What It Feels Like To Be Killed Off "Game Of Thrones" When Your Character Is Still Alive In The Books
Spoilers, obviously.
HBO
Death abounds on HBO's Game of Thrones — just ask Jack Gleeson (Joffrey), Rory McCann (The Hound), Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister), Sibel Kekilli (Shae), or Rose Leslie (Ygritte). But each of those actors knew their characters' fates upon landing their respective roles, since George R.R. Martin had previously killed them in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels upon which the show is based.
So what happens when Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss decide the show no longer needs a character that still exists in Martin's books?
Turns out, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who played Jojen Reed (until he was killed in the Season 4 finale), was just as surprised as fans to learn about his character's fate.
"I found out on the plane flying over to film Season 4," the actor revealed to BuzzFeed during an interview for his new movie, The Maze Runner. "It happens in the last episode, so I was reading all the scripts and I got to the page where it says, 'Jojen gets stabbed repeatedly in the stomach.' I thought, That's OK. I'll be fine because no one's told me yet and I'm not dead in the books. I'll be fine.
"So I keep reading and see, 'Meera comes over and slits his throat.' Then I thought, Well, I'm amongst all these White Walkers. Maybe the plan is to turn me into a White Walker — that would be really, really cool. Then, that little girl comes out, throws a Molotov cocktail, and I burst into flames. That's when I knew I was definitely, definitely dead. Dead. Properly dead."
HBO
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