1.
La obra «Bab el Sheikh» (2013), de Hayv Kahraman.
2.
El tema «Blanket», de Kevin Abstract.
3.
La canción «ilunabarrean», de Galder.
4.
La crónica / memoria de Amy Margolis «1978» en The Iowa Review. Se trata de un extracto del libro más largo en el que está trabajando la autora y también directora del Iowa Summer Writing Festival sobre su llegada a Nueva York (desde Kansas City) a finales de los setenta y su vida como bailarina.
Un extracto:
«In New York, I am always afraid, but never with Paul and Philip. Paul and Philip are men, especially Philip. They’re towering figures both, and unabashed, and at home in their skin. They’re older than me and they know everything. In Manhattan Plaza, the apartment complex where we live, Paul dresses me up like a doll and powders me with sparkle dust and Philip pulls me onto his lap and reads me the stories I missed in childhood, like the story of Babar, who is an elephant, and also French.
There is no traffic in the Meatpacking District. There are no storefronts, no homeless, no garbage cans or human detritus. Sometimes, in Midtown or in the Village, Philip opens his giant cape and throws it around me like Dracula. Together we walk, my arms around his waist. I close my eyes and go where he takes me.
Tonight, in the Meatpacking District, we’re bare, we’re too much exposed.
“Where’s the meat?” I ask.
“The meat!” Paul screams, and laughs. When Paul laughs, he throws his head back like a starlet. He has a flexible neck for a man.
“The butcher shops,” I say. “The slaughterhouses. Where are they?”
I’m from Kansas City, a cow town, but I don’t like to think about slaughterhouses. Still, I wish there were one here now.
“Long gone,” Philip says. “The meatpackers packed up and left years and years ago.”
“Where’s the meat!” Paul sings. His voice rolls like smoke along the barren streets to the river.
The bar is in a narrow street behind a door with no sign. The music is so loud and percussive, it makes the long, low building’s tenuous roof jump. Outside, the cracked sidewalk trembles underfoot.
Paul and Philip install me on a stool at the bar. Men in leather pants and white muscle shirts, the shirts we call wifebeaters where I grew up, rush to pet and embrace me. I’m the only woman here. I wish I had taken more care with my outfit, with my face. The men stroke my hair. One leans in close and says, “You’re flawless.” He gives me the softest kiss on my forehead, like the kiss Glinda the Good Witch gives Dorothy.
The men lock elbows with Paul and Philip and dance them away, into the crowd of other men.
I’m so painfully shy, it’s a misery for me to speak, but here I’m not expected to. The bare-chested bartender brings me sweet drinks—the kind no real drinker drinks—and I perch demurely, fishing for cherries and pineapple chunks in my frosted glass. I nod along to the music. I enjoy my rich interior life».
5.
El artículo «Days of The Jackal: how Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business», de Alex Blasdel para The Guardian.
Un extracto:
«Wylie’s literary tastes and international reach helped to create what was for several decades the dominant vision of literary celebrity. In the era in which writers such as Roth and Martin Amis had an almost equal place in the tabloids and in the New York Review of Books, when they were famous in Milan as well as Manhattan, and might plausibly afford to keep apartments in both, when they were public intellectuals living semi-public lives, Wylie was the most audacious broker of literary talent in the world, a man who seemed equally intimate with high culture and high finance.
Today, that era of priapic literary celebrity has faded, and some believe that Wylie’s stock has gone down with it. “I think the Wylie moment has passed,” Andrew Franklin, the former managing director and co-founder of Profile Books, told me. “When he dies, his agency will fall apart.” A crop of younger agents and large talent agencies have attempted to adapt many of Wylie’s business strategies to a new reality, in which literary culture is highly fragmented and clients are less likely to be novelists or historians than “multichannel artists” with books, podcasts and Netflix deals.
Wylie thinks that’s bunk. Even if the era of high literary fame is dead, he believes great literature continues to represent the best long-term investment. “Shakespeare is more interesting and more valuable than Microsoft and Walt Disney combined,” he told me, repeating an argument he has been making in the media for more than 20 years. All the Bard of Avon lacked was a good trademark lawyer, a long-term estate management plan and, of course, the right agent.»
