Welcome back!
We’re gonna start on a slightly different note than the usual Donald Trump and climate disaster thing.
Todd Phillips’ The Joker was released today in a whirlwind of drama. Its depiction of political unrest and antisocial tendencies turning to violence has left many uncomfortable. Here is an article over at Slate which might help navigate the complicated context and ramifications of the film. Narrative always seems to have a particularly inflammatory role in society, perhaps even more so as individual events come to have dramaturgical significance which transcends the events themselves, spurred in large part by increasingly extreme narrative politics and a media system rooted in storytelling, which are linked cyclically with consumer expectations molded by those very systems. Like a big dumb literary tornado.
I sense I might be preaching to the choir here. Well, if you’re so inclined, here are seven ways you can hide the release of Frozen 2 from your child, courtesy of McSweeney’s. To go along with the movie thing.
In any case, here is an article from over at ElectricLit about something you might be interested in buying: America’s very first banned book. On the other end of the spectrum, here is a wonderful and comprehensive list from LitHub of the ten best debut novels of the decade. And, if it suits your taste, here is another article from LitHub about stillness, disguise, and nature writing.
To cap it off, here’s an interview posted over at The Rumpus with Shonda Buchanan, who was in Missoula in September as a CutBank-sponsored author at the Montana Book Festival.
See you next week.