⢠Did you know that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde probably boned? "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," Wilde said. This may not be "news," but it was news to me.
⢠By the way, Walt Whitman once referred to his chest hair as the scented herbage of his breast. (You're welcome, bears.) And he ended one of his lesser-known poems by blowing his load in the reader. (You're welcome x2, bears.)
⢠If you just got funny feelings after having poem-sex with Whitman, take this cold shower in the form of Jonathan Franzen writing sex scenes.
⢠Let's change the subject. Several prestigious and semi-lucrative PEN Awards have just been announced. Buzzfeed's Saeed Jones snagged this year's PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for his pretty fantastic Prelude to Bruise. Rob Spillman, who's the editor of Portland-based lit mag Tin House, received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing.
⢠I know, I knowâall you can think about right now is Franzen whispering "Oh Pussycat." I would just like you to know that I'm sorry, and that there's an opportunity for you to get so hammered you forget Frazen's clitoris descriptions. Thursday night, Hugo House is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Cheap Wine & Poetry. For newbies: It's not just wine and not just poetry. PBR is $1 per can, and tomorrow's non-poets include Stranger columnist David Schmader.
⢠If you havenât picked up Toni Morrisonâs latest novel, God Help the Child, youâre missing out on a new development in a writer with the power to reduce Cornel West to a child bowing at the foot of his granny's rocker. Morrison has swapped her signature lyrical register for a more straightforward, punchy style:
I wish they would stop calling it welfare and go back to the word they used when my mother was a girl. Then it was called âRelief.â Sounds much better, like itâs just a short-term breather while you get yourself together. Besides, those welfare clerks are mean as spit. When finally I got work and didnât need them anymore, I was making more money than they ever did. I guess meanness filled out their skimpy paychecks, which is why they treated us like beggars.
⢠Oh yeah, and Maggie Nelson, who's chest-thumping good and who's coming to Hugo House next year, just published her latest genius thing, a non-fiction collage called The Argonauts. Here's one of her countless casually brilliant passages:
A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color a certain ontological indeterminacy: it isnât quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color. Context also changes it: all cats are gray, etc. Nor is color voluntary, precisely. But none of these formulations means that the object in question is colorless.
