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“When my first novel, The Last Samurai, was published, I was distraught at the loss of time because so many other books had been derailed. I went to agents with a postcard of Vladimir Horowitz, arms folded, standing in front of his Picasso. The pianist of genius had used the money he earned with his performances to buy a single Picasso, I explained. But Picasso owned every Picasso that ever existed. When he wanted to see what Picasso would do next, he went to his studio to do the next thing he wanted to do. If he had had to stop for a year to chase sales, what should he have done with the money? Buy a Braque?” In a piece from the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 18, Helen DeWitt rethinks “the machinery of legitimacy” that disempowers authors.
“Whereas Beyoncé commands us to get in formation, Monáe pushes us to think about the multiple types of formations we might discover in the groove, in the sheets, and on the streets while also blurring the line between these contexts. With her “emotion picture,” Monáe asserts her debts to genres of feeling and film, of sound and movement, and of black radical imaginaries that precede her while also willfully scrambling, suturing, and signifying on these antecedents.” Adrienne Brown observes Janelle Monáe’s radical “emotion picture,” the 44-minute film accompanying the release of her latest album, Dirty Computer.
“I haven’t talked much about dad because he wasn’t really in my life after I was 10 years old (though he was in my life more than you or our sisters). Dad grew up wanting to be a TV anchorman … despite coming from a small logging town and having zero contacts … and yet he achieved that dream. … My father was a TV screen, and I knew that I was stronger than he was. So yeah, I could break into TV. No problem. And I did.” Writer Tod Goldberg interviews his older brother, writer Lee Goldberg.
On BLARB, Joanna Chen visits Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who is facing up to eight years in prison.
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