March 2011
4 posts
A Poem for Ōfunato
Huddled and cold, many so elderly, evacuees making their way The clasped hands of a woman scouring a newspaper’s names The tears of survivors greeting for the first time (First, the gratitude of life; then, the whispers of death)
A city: obliterated. Small universes: annihilated. Now, calm. Now, digging—not to rebuild but to bury the dead There, I saw a carpenter’s plane and...
Game Over, Old Sport
For The Economist online, I wrote about a video game adaptation of The Great Gatsby:
For children of the 1980s, the discovery last month of a seemingly long-lost video-game adaptation of The Great Gatsby evoked a few bygone pleasures. The grey 8-bit cartridge — familiar to classic Nintendo gamers worldwide — was said to have been found at a garage sale for 50 cents. An apparently...
My Friend Laura Lee Spoke With Ken Kalfus Last...
And here they are:
LAURA THARP: I recently re-read Infinite Jest and was again blown away. How did David Foster Wallace come to blurb your work?
KEN KALFUS: Wallace published some of my first short stories in The Sonora Review, the literary magazine of the University of Arizona at Tucson, in the 1980s. He was pursuing his MFA there, and he was the journal’s fiction editor. We exchanged...
A Little Night Music: Katy Goodman's La Sera
For Interview, I spoke with Katy Goodman, of Vivian Girls, about her extraordinary new album, La Sera:
Katy Goodman is singing to me. Though she’s at soundcheck in downtown Los Angeles with her primary band, Vivian Girls, she isn’t singing one of their songs. Nor is she testing a tune from her other band, La Sera, whose lush album of Brill Building-inspired songs has just come out....