THE NEW FUTURIAN

Blog thoughts from Keith Wagstaff, noted human being and possible time traveler. keithwagstaff.com

[thenewfuturian]

I know the general outline of despair.

André Breton, “The Verb to Be” 

[explore-blog]

The great thing about scientists is that they understand the limitations of knowledge. And they also know that not to know everything does not mean that we know nothing. I like that — that’s how people should think.

On Big Think’s excellent Think Again podcast, Salman Rushdie echoes Carl Sagan on the value of not-knowing, Henry Beston on the limits of knowledge, and Thoreau’s notion of “useful ignorance.”

Complement with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with uncertainty in the age of knowledge. 

(via explore-blog)

[thenewfuturian]

Employees are more productive than ever. Too bad their wages aren’t going up. 

[nprbooks]

Via the fine folks at Electric Lit – How to Name Your Big Important Novel. Apparently mine is The Left Hand of Anxiety of the d’Urbervilles, which is, I dunno, weirdly appropriate?

– Petra

[joylandmagazine]

MOST READ 2015

Last week we released our Publishers’ Picks of 2015 and this week it’s our annual list of Most Read Stories and Essays. Thanks to our readers for reading the hell out of these stories, our authors and editors for their incredible work, and all our friends and comrades at the lit journals, curation sites, publishers, and bookstores across North America for their support.

Most Read Essay: Crossover Potential by Sarah Wambold

Most Read on the Midwest: Murder Games by Caitlin Horricks

Most Read on Toronto: Swimming through Whales by Shannon Alberta

Most Read on Montreal: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Lynn Crosbie

Most Read on the South: Notice of a Fourth Location by Kristen Arnett

Most Read on New York (tie): Bottom by Cecilia Corrigan

Most Read on New York (tie): Stay a While by Alice Kaltman

Most Read on Vancouver: Veneers by Nicole Boyce

Most Read on Los Angeles: Olympic by Keith Wagstaff

Most Read on San Francisco: Surrogate by Caille Millner

Before we go, in 2016 Joyland will be saying goodbye to Managing Editor Anna Prushinskaya. For two years Anna edited the Midwest section, coordinated events, and kept the social media lights on. Thank you, Anna! Taking on Managing Editor duties is Kyle Lucia Wu who will also be selecting work for New York. Joining us as well is Charles McLeod, who will be editing our new Pacific Northwest section out of Portland. Our San Francisco editor Kara Levy will be taking a sabbatical this year. Los Angeles editor Lisa Locascio will oversee all of California as its deity of fiction.

[thenewfuturian]

So happy to be included in this list. Don’t forget to follow @joylandmagazine. 

[kateoplis]

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (via thetinhouse)

[hragv]

Rachel Goodyear, “Dancing Devils” (2011) at The Drawing Center

[wordsnquotes]

There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva (via poetsandwriters)

[thenewfuturian]

NASA just released a bunch of crazy photos of the Orbital ATK Antares rocket that exploded last year. 

[theparisreview]

There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.

Anne Carson (via theparisreview)

[poetsandwriters]

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”

—John Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” quoted by Dr. Jon Jenkins of NASA, describing the new discovery of an Earth-like planet (The New York Times, 2015)

[penguinrandomhouse]

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word ‘escape’ used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

Alice Munro, b. 7/10/1931 (via penguinrandomhouse)

[joylandmagazine]

Keith Wagstaff on Joyland Los Angeles

We woke each other in the night. We lit stolen cigarettes in strange places. We lied. We sent each other notes signed with lines from poets we had never read. In Salinas, we walked past mannequins in dark windows. We told each other trivial secrets and drank harsh vodka from a plastic bottle and almost missed our bus back to Berkeley.

[thenewfuturian]

I would like this bike please, thanks Internet gods. 

[natgeotravel]

Reflections: A young boy casts a striking comparison to an aging man lost in a book on a ferry in Istanbul. 

Photograph by Merve Ates, National Geographic Your Shot

[92ny]

Left: The program for Jorge Luis Borges’ 92Y appearance on April 29, 1976. Woodcut by Antonio Frasconi. Right: W. S. Merwin and Jorge Luis Borges backstage at 92Y on April 29, 1976. Photo by Thomas Victor.

We close out our celebration of National Poetry Month in April with the latest upload to the Unterberg Poetry Center’s 75 at 75 virtual anthology: W. S. Merwin on Jorge Luis Borges. A special project for the Poetry Center’s 75th anniversary and beyond, 75 at 75 invites authors to listen to recordings from our archive and write a personal response. 

Here, W. S. Merwin writes about sharing the stage with Borges in 1976. The reading, which featured commentary by Borges and readings from his work by Merwin, Richard Howard and Emer Rodríguez Monegal, was recorded live at 92Y on April 29, 1976.

I read Borges’ writings as they were published in English, and I have gone on reading and re-reading him over the years and always, even works I have read many times before, with a sense of discovery of something rich and strange. No one else is like him, and, for all his vast reading, clearly he was not trying to be like anyone else. All my life—an age rich with great writing (and fraught with catastrophes)—he has been a treasure. I feel very lucky to have met him at the Y.

Read the full essay on 92Y On Demand. 

Previously: 

Clare Cavanagh on Czesław Miłosz Dionne Brand on Adrienne Rich Pura Lopez-Colome on Seamus Heaney Tomas Tranströmer