TPR Is Lit - September 2012
19.09.2012
There was a time we used to write letters. It was around the time the telephone was still plugged into the wall...and really much before that. Some historians would place the first postal system around 1700 BC during the reign of Hammurabi. If we estimate the last letter was written by Dave Ebbons of Hoboken, New Jersey sometime around 1999, that gives us a solid four thousand years of writing letter experience (a conservative estimate really). Four thousand years is pretty good humanity. Let’s not give it up now. We at TPR love everything about letters. We love writing them and we love receiving them. In an effort to celebrate the form, we present Remember When We Used to Write Letters. Today, Groucho Marx writes to Woody Allen.
18.09.2012
Terribly Produced YouTube Film Reminds Extremists They Want to Kill Salman Rushdie By The Editors
You know when you have that vague feeling of forgetting something but you can’t remember what it is? You leave the house unsure of what it was. It nags at you all day until that moment you reach for that something you need and realize it’s not there. It happens to us all the time…with keys. The same thing happened to Iran last week…with assassination. Talk about embarrassing.
17.09.2012
The Great Gatsby and the New Czech Prohibition By The Editors
Here in the Czech Republic prohibition suddenly turned from a historical oddity into a discomforting reality. The deaths of over 20 people from cheap liquor, made from methanol rather than ethanol, led to the Czech government taking the extreme step on Friday night of outlawing the sale of all spirits with more than 20% alcohol by volume. The ban went into force immediately and bars were left with ghostly gaps on their shelves, or forced to cover their liquor up. Health Minister Leos Heger said the ban could potentially last weeks.
14.09.2012
Life’s a grind, but what can you do about it? Go to school. Get a job. Toil through eight or nine hour days. Go home to an empty house and eat leftovers while watching re-runs. Get a partner to forget about the empty house. Make love to forget about the eight hour days. Pop out a little genetic copy of yourself requisite with all your fragile little failings and hope you don’t fuck the kid up to the point where he’s spending more than you make on therapy bills. If you’re a man go impotent. If you’re a woman, it’s the other thing. And that’s about it. Buk saw it a different way.
14.09.2012
Tom Cruise Silences Bar Full of Drunks with Poetry By The Editors
You know that certain point of the night? Yeah, that one. When a few of “those guys” start getting a little too drunk and ruin a good time for everybody. What if there was some way to soothe their fractured egos and return the bar back to a peaceful equilibrium so you can talk to that blonde and maybe hash out a few Journey tunes on the jukebox? Tom Cruise, the world’s most famous Xenu enthusiast, has a way. It’s simple. Use terrible poetry.
13.09.2012
Ernest Hemingway Wrote Forty-seven Different Endings to A Farewell to Arms By The Editors
Even for the greatest of writers, finishing a work can be difficult. Some are able to press the final period onto the page and walk away. Others meticulously weigh and re-weigh every word choice and scenario until they end up with several alternate stories within a single text. Ernest Hemingway took this to the extreme with A Farewell to Arms. How extreme? Try forty-seven endings extreme.
12.09.2012
See an Author Write a Book Live on Google Docs By The Editors
Writing can be a lot like boxing. You will get hit and you will fail repeatedly. The work will be exhaustive and you will think about quitting. Most of this failure (if you’re lucky) is done behind closed doors away from the public eye. When a work is sent out for public consumption or a boxer strolls down the aisle on his way to the ring, it's a final product you are seeing. There is none of the questioning, the insecurity, or the quiet hours spent contemplating. There is just the failure or the success of the thing. Anybody who enters the ring or puts pen to page gets honest credit from TPR. So when an author not only puts her work out there, but makes us privy to every single word as she writes it, well, that just makes her a hero.
11.09.2012
In Memoriam: Tom Junod's Brilliant Piece About The Falling Man By The Editors
Richard Drew took the picture you see on September 11, 2001. Two years after the events of that day Tom Junod went on a search to discover the man’s identity. He wrote a story about it for Esquire. The piece was selected as one of the seven best in Esquire’s history. What Junod uncovers is much more than a photo but so much less than any ultimate truth or understanding.
11.09.2012
This Is Your Brain on Drugs, This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen By The Editors
We’re not going to lie. As much as we’d like to appear as erudite forces of good and serious literature, we haven’t always been this way. There were times we took life less than seriously. Shocking, isn’t it dear reader? On top of that we have a confession. No, in high school we did not read Pride & Prejudice in 11th grade language arts. We were in the parking lot (car park?) engaging in illicit activities that entire year and for good reason. Illicit activity is fun. We know—from the popular PSA—that such behavior will turn your brain into scrambled eggs or was it sunny side up? Can never remember because of the drugs…and also they make you hungry. But the question beckons: What does your brain look like on Jane Austen? That indefatigable truth monster known as science now has an answer.
10.09.2012
Philip Roth Not a Credible Source on Philip Roth, According to Wikipedia By The Editors
Some Wikipedia inaccuracies are more annoying than others. Most are amusing. There’s the one that calls David Beckham an “18th-century Chinese goalkeeper.” Perhaps our favorite is the entry that informs us that a young Robbie Williams ate hamsters “in and around Stoke” for a living. These are things we know aren’t true except for the fact that they must be. We read it on Wikipedia.
07.09.2012
Because It's 5 O'clock Somewhere: Jack Kerouac Is Charming and Boozy on French Canadian Television By The Editors
Sometimes in this life the planets align and beautiful things happen. Usually these moments bloom for an all too short time and demand us to cast out illusory worry and anticipation in order to fully experience these little blooms in the fragile instant in which they exist…well, that was until YouTube. Every Friday, we at TPR pluck one of these moments from the bushel in what we call Because It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere. Today, we present Jack Kerouac.
06.09.2012
Famed Supermodel Emily Dickinson Does Another Photo Shoot By The Editors
Photos of Emily Dickinson (left) are scarce. In fact, there’s only one known photograph of the legendary recluse. Naturally, it’s kind of hard to get a picture of a woman who didn’t leave her house for the last twenty years of her life. So when an alleged daguerreotype of the New England poet shows up in her home town of Amherst you can see how bookish types might get excited.
05.09.2012
The BBC Posted a Guide to Kafka's Prague By The Editors
Guide books are hit and miss. A really great can one can expose you to parts of a city you wouldn’t have known otherwise. Other ones will simply shepherd you towards tourist traps and $8 Coronas. Personally, TPR doesn’t have the guide books problem. We happen to be literary geeks, and if a city has even a mild whiff of literary history we know our first destination after the closest pub to whatever hotel we happen to be staying in.
04.09.2012
The toilet is a very underrated repository of musing moments. Where exactly do you think The Thinker was sitting? At TPR, so many of our great thoughts come while we’re on the can. At least we think they’re brilliant at the moment, but we can never seem to recall them in exactly the right way. It just doesn’t sound…right. But then again we’ve never come to the realization that our brother-in-law is the biggest drug dealer in the Southwestern United States. We would remember that.
03.09.2012
Bob Dylan has had to put up with the field of semiotics ever since donning a blue Triumph motorcycle shirt for the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. What does it mean? Is it some kind of symbol representing existential angst and man’s consequent desire to escape such angst? Or perhaps a comment on Abraham’s rebellious nature in the face of God’s unnatural command? Dylan’s response (and we’re paraphrasing): “It’s just a shirt, man.”
20.09.2012
Keanu Reeves wrote a poem. And an artist drew pictures to that poem. The poem contains lines like "I draw a hot sorrow bath/In my despair room" and has an ash black drawing of a bath. A bit cringe, right? Reading that may induce the kind of giddy high moment where human beings derive joy from another human being’s failure. Simon Cowell calls it cash. The Germans call it schadenfreude. And this would be ripe for it if the whole enterprise wasn’t a self-effacing smirk at Reeves’ public persona.
21.09.2012
Whether you think he’s a depressing doom-monger or that the radiant sun of all lyrical genius shines out of his now saggy 78 year-old behind (we assume…TPR’s lawyers would like us to make it clear we have neither photographic nor firsthand evidence), Leonard Cohen is not a man anyone with the slightest modicum of musical pretension can ignore. It’s also hardly a secret that he was a poet and novelist before turning to song writing. He has continuously published. His latest collection of new work, Book of Longing, came out in 2006. An anthology of older poems and songs appeared as recently as 2011, and this very year he released 15 Poems, a collection in eBook format with his own illustrations (another of his often overlooked talents).
24.09.2012
What He Read: The Literary Mind of Tupac Shakur By The Editors
Naturally, he wrote poetry before writing any other kind of verse. He trained in ballet. He eschewed a normal high school education to pursue dramatic studies at the Baltimore School for the Arts. As a punishment, his mother used to sit him down and make him read the New York Times cover to cover. Michael Eric Dyson judged that upon completion of high school he was “extraordinarily well read and well-rounded intellectually — likely more so than the average student entering in the first year class of most Ivy League institutions.” He read Herman Melville and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (look it up). Also, the feminist works of Robin Miller and Alice Walker. He was a rap star but before he was a rap star, he was a literary mind. He was Tupac Amaru Shakur.
25.09.2012
A TPR Literary Crush: Anne Brechin on The Butcher By The Editors
I recently re-posted a pic of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on Facebook, simply for the purposes of pointing out how seriously, ridiculously fit he was (for American English speakers out there, “fit” is Brit slang for attractive or basically rather beddable – see Mike Skinner for more details). Yes, in many people’s eyes, he was a love-rat, cheater and a bit of cad. But let’s be honest for minute, shall we? If we met him in a bar circa 1956, we would go home with him and do the dirty – several times, hopefully.
26.09.2012
Writers are generally associated with self-destructive behavior because, life, right? For some writers it becomes a hallmark of their work. Think Hunter Thompson. Most writers are able to publically disassociate their work from these tendencies. Some of the latter are even able to keep these behaviors from marring their personal lives. Fewer writers, still, are well-adjusted individuals who don’t require the insidious comfort self-destruction provides, mostly because well-adjusted writers don’t exist. They quit long before they cross the nominal threshold to become mortgage brokers instead , or, oh we don’t know, the current President of the United States. So it comes as no surprise to us that a new book alleges John Keats was an opium addict. What does this mean? In terms of the work it means absolutely nothing, despite some academics who’ve probably never used opium and have no idea how to apply a saddle to the back of a dragon.
27.09.2012
This Is Not a Post About Moby Dick By Shaan Joshi
The life of a sailor can be rough yet exhilarating, like any number of Brazilian port towns. I know this because a sailor tells me, and I do not mean that in an abstract way. They call him Sea Wolf or at least that’s what they call him in Czech. There are other things I know because Sea Wolf tells me. For instance, I now know that sailors are massively superstitious and are especially superstitious about dolphins. Yes, dolphins. Apparently dolphins precipitate doom. I also know that if you buy a Brazilian whore’s family groceries, she ceases be a whore. I know that because Sea Wolf calls her girlfriend now.
27.09.2012
This Is Not a Post About Moby Dick By Shaan Joshi
The life of a sailor can be rough yet exhilarating, like any number of Brazilian port towns. I know this because a sailor tells me, and I do not mean that in an abstract way. They call him Sea Wolf or at least that’s what they call him in Czech. There are other things I know because Sea Wolf tells me. For instance, I now know that sailors are massively superstitious and are especially superstitious about dolphins. Yes, dolphins. Apparently dolphins precipitate doom. I also know that if you buy a Brazilian whore’s family groceries, she ceases be a whore. I know that because Sea Wolf calls her girlfriend now.
28.09.2012
Because It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere: James Baldwin Preaches Truth at UC Berkeley By The Editors
If you think it’s hard to be a gay person or a black person, imagine what it was like to be an openly gay, black individual in America…in the 1960’s. If you’re able to do that, you can start to imagine the mindset of one James Baldwin. Here we see the (amazing) novelist and (amazing) poet engaged in a panel discussion at UC Berkeley. The craft in Baldwin’s words is evident even in this format.
