weekend links: Misty Copeland, ChingoZine, Katie Rose Pipkin
A mural from the town of Tixtla, Mexico. Photo by Livia Radwanski. Image appears courtesy of Hyperallergic.
It’s been nine months since 43 students disappeared following a protest in the Mexican city of Iguala. In the face of widespread unrest and government suspicion, bilingual publishing house Mexico City Lit has compiled a free digital anthology of poetry commemorating the tragedy. [Hyperallergic]
Misty Copeland made history this week, becoming the first black woman to be named a principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. I like how unapologetically ambitious she was in this 2014 New Yorker profile. Get it! [New York Times]
Dinner party small talk alert: Christian Lorentzen laments David Foster Wallace’s posthumous legacy as a “wisdom-dispensing sage,” fretting that since his death Wallace has become an icon to the great unwashed. Lorentzen makes some valid points—e.g., DFW was an asshole—amidst paragraphs of childish literary snobbery. [New York Magazine]
DFW joins a long list of tortured artists featured in a biopic, but absent from that list is French composer Erik Satie. You’ve heard his Gymnopédies in a million different movies (such as), but did you know that he was nuts? He was a hermit who wore seven identical suits for ten years! More notably, he was also a “torchbearer for the avante-garde.” [The Guardian]
It’s summer, the perfect season to reread Vladimir Nabokov’s wacky road trip romp Lolita. John Colapinto explores how an aristocratic Russian refugee wrote a quintessentially American novel. [New Yorker]
Austin’s Puro Chingón Collective publishes ChingoZine, an art zine featuring original work by emerging Latino artists. Check it out at the Blanton Museum of Art, where issues are on display in All the Signs are (T)Here: Social Iconography in Mexican and Chicano Art from Collections at The University of Texas at Austin. [Conflict of Interest]
Other people’s bookshelves: Tribeza’s Sofia Sokolove asked Austin’s literati what they’re reading this summer. Featuring picks by our friends at American Short Fiction, The Austin Review, Texas Book Festival, and A Strange Object. [Tribeza]
And if you haven’t been to Katie Rose Pipkin’s exhibit at Not Gallery yet, you’ve got tonight and tomorrow to do so. Raw Paw published her fantastically titled chapbook picking figs in the garden while my world eats Itself to accompany the show, and both are worth checking out. [Austin Chronicle]
—Alyssa G. Ramirez