Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder trial, is back in the spotlight, as the FX television series rehashes the case, including the withering comments Clark endured about her appearance. Now a crime novelist, Clark says she always envied the way authors work, “because they can be very successful, but no one knows what they look like. You don’t get recognized. It’s a pretty cool way to work.”
Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, Ben Lerner talks with Susan Howe.
On April 18th, the Martha Graham Dance Company will stage a live marathon reading of Graham’s 1991 memoir, Blood Memory, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
The online inquest into Gay Talese’s unfortunate comment at a Boston University writer’s conference continues, as Rewire has tracked down the audience member who asked Talese the question about women writers who have inspired him (he said “none,” though he later clarified that he thought the question was asking about women journalists of his generation). The New York Times details the ensuing Tweet storm, including a description of what happened when Talese arrived home from the conference. His wife, the distinguished editor and publisher Nan A. Telese, greeted him with these chilling words: “Welcome home, darling. You’re all over Twitter.” In the same article, Katie Roiphe defends the octogenarian author, saying, “He read what he read. The policing of inspiration and influence is really pathological. I believe it to be a feeding frenzy and sign of a debased discourse that passes for Internet culture. This is blood sport.”
Meanwhile, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?”, Calvin Trillin’s poem about Chinese food in last week’s food-and-travel issue of the New Yorker, has been criticized as both racist and “poorly metered.” That last link is to a collaborative Twitter poem satirizing Trillin’s, entitled “The World is Our Oyster / Sauce,” one of a number of impromptutributes, including Franny Choi’s “Have They Run Out of White Poets Yet?” Trillin defended himself in an email to The Guardian, saying that his poem was simply intended to mock the “food-obsessed bourgeoisie,” just as an earlier effort in the New Yorker, “What happened to Brie and Chablis?,” had not been intended as “a put-down of the French.”