Link Grabbag

By Isaac Butler

Hey Parabasites... I've been very ill with a stomach bug, holidaying and grading my ever-loving ass off lately, and am seriously backed up on work, so I apologize for the light state of posting around here.  In the meantime, I am going to try to regularly post links to some of the stuff I discover while researching procrastinating.  Enjoy!

Theater: Over at The Taylor Trash, we have some handy words of advice for the young, aspiring theater critic. Meanwhile, Alison Croggon, one of theater blogging's OG's is hanging up her spurs. There's so few of us left now! Meanwhile, Bitter Lemons writes about a recent article in the LA Times about the recent(ish) trend for shorter plays and concludes that plays must be getting shorter because kids these days can't write and audiences are now stupider than they used to be. Comments section fury ensues.

Literature: Roxane Gay has some unkind (and well deserved) words for Simon & Schuster's new selfpublishing venture.

Grant Morrison pens an epic--and it really is epic-- smackdown of Alan Moore over at Comicsbeat.  Morrison seems clearly in the right vis-a-vis both their decades long animosity for one another and the larger philosophical questions of influence, pastiche and originality. Alan Moore's schtick has long been to create work that openly builds on and gleefully steals from previous creators and then claim that he is a sui generis genius and everyone else is ripping him off. If one applied Moore's own standards for what "original" is to Moore's work, you'd have to argue that great amounts of it is deeply unoriginal, including Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls and Swamp Thing. That said, Morrison goes into such picayune detail about each slight that I'll applaud you if you can get through the whole thing in one sitting.

Charles Simic is now a blogger? Yes. And he's awesome. 

UNCATEGORIZABLE: Glenn Beck is hawking a toy Obama submerged in a jar of his (Beck's) urine. I'm more surprised by the fact that he's heard of "Piss Christ." McSweeney's brings us "Artisanal Baby Naming." 

 

Comments

[P.Dantic]

"Allison Croggan?" (You managed to misspell both her names! )

[Isaac]

Fixed. Thanks for catching the error.

[Alison Croggon]

Thanks for the pointer, Isaac.