• Yes yes yes yes, it’s Bloomsday! All you need to know about Bloomsday is that it's the day fans of the literary legend James Joyce rejoice (pun and gratuitous alliteration mandated by the holiday) and do nerdy stuff like read selections of the modern master's work in public, which in Seattle is happening at Town Hall this evening. But mostly, today is a reminder to reread Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which is one of the realist real-talks in all of literature. If you’d describe your relationship with men as “complicated” or “troubled” or “tenuous but for some reason constant” and want some company, then find 25 quiet minutes and watch this. If you’re a hopeless romantic and you want to skip straight to the part where you cry a bowl of tears due to a string of precisely placed yeses, then watch this.
• If you're only into literature for the filthy talk: Skip Molly Bloom's soliloquy entirely and just read Joyce's erotic letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle. They're tops.
• Famous fiction writers aren't the only ones with a cache of hot correspondences, right? Don't you keep a few in your sock drawer, in a box below your bed, among your several thousand e-mails? Submit one letter or a single correspondence to Sink Review before July 15 and maybe one day your most intimate exchanges will be the subject of a bi-weekly column.
• The Vanessa Place saga continues apace, and has now entered the Longform Think Piece stage of its news cycle. Ken Chen looks at the scandal and others like it from an historical perspective, one that shows avant-garde poetry to be a racist institution. Over at the LA Review of Books, Kim Calder uses a lot of rhetorical questions as claims and says "perhaps" a LOT, but I think she's basically saying that Place's piece is a "structural" piece of art that responds to and is most appropriately considered in the context of cultural "structures." Since the piece does not originate from the person of Vanessa Place, it's not productive to think of it as an attack on other people. Guess who flipped shit about that? Yep. The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, who wrote some comments on Calder's article that they claim have been taken down.
• Maybe all this talk of poetry working through its demons is causing you to dislike it even more than you automatically do? You're not alone. Please read Marianne Moore's poem "Poetry," which begins, "I, too, dislike it." Then read Ben Lerner's recent essay in the London Review of Books about disliking poetry.
• Now that you're back in a hopelessly hopeful state regarding the power of the word, gear yourself up for several cool lit events going on in Seattle this week. Check out Jim Shepard reading from his incredible The Book of Aron at the Central Library on Wednesday, and also Vendala Vida at Elliott Bay on Thursday.
