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☆ Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on ‘Tortured Poets’
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-19 | by ( Madison Malone Kircher | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Fans of Taylor Swift often study up for a new album, revisiting the singer’s older works to prepare to analyze lyrics and song titles for secret messages and meanings. “The Tortured Poets Department” is getting much the same treatment, and perhaps no group of listeners was better prepared than the students at Harvard University currently studying Ms. Swift’s works in an English class devoted entirely to the artist. The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. On Thursday night, about 50 students from the class gathered in a lecture hall on campus to listen to Ms. Swift’s new album. Mary Pankowski, a 22-year-old senior studying history of art and architecture, wore a cream sweatshirt she bought at Ms. Swift’s Eras tour last year.

Persons: Taylor Swift, Department ”, Swift’s, “ Taylor Swift, ”, Stephanie Burt, Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Mary Pankowski Organizations: Department, Harvard University

☆ A Swift, Opinionated Portrait of Willa Cather (She Would Have Approved)
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-12 | by ( Andrea Barrett | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

CHASING BRIGHT MEDUSAS: A Life of Willa Cather, by Benjamin TaylorDuring the difficult months of 2020, a writer friend and I decided to read Willa Cather’s fiction together. Much of it was rereading, but I’d missed some stories and novels, and I’d never read them sequentially or with a clear sense of Cather’s life. Tonally and politically different, written with obvious adoration or apparent dislike, focusing intently on Cather’s work or scrutinizing her private life — so many biographies! From Edith Lewis’s “personal record” in “Willa Cather Living” (1953) to the massive, almost day-by-day accounting of James Woodress’s “Willa Cather: A Literary Life” (1987) and the detailed critical readings of Hermione Lee’s “Willa Cather: Double Lives” (1989), I learned lots about Cather, and sometimes more than I wanted about her biographers. A fresh perspective on Cather’s sexuality came from Sharon O’Brien’s “Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice” (1986), while Joan Acocella provided a witty, abrasive take on academic analyses of Cather’s work in “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism” (2000).

Persons: Willa Cather, Benjamin Taylor, Willa Cather’s, I’d, Edith Lewis’s “, “ Willa Cather, ”, James Woodress’s “ Willa Cather, Hermione Lee’s “ Willa Cather, Cather, Sharon O’Brien’s “ Willa Cather, Joan Acocella, Proust, Philip Roth, “, Taylor Locations: “

☆ Feeling lonely? Go to the library.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-24 | by ( Juliana Kaplan | Eliza Relman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

And it's becoming clearer just how important "third places" — spaces for socializing outside of work and home — are. Wood, who thinks libraries are "one of the last true third places," explained that there are a range of spaces in her library. Abrams said he regularly drops by the New York Public Library just to pick up sticky buns from Amy's Bread, a bakery with an outpost in the library. Eliza Relman/InsiderIn Boston, for instance, the Boston Public Library is thriving, Gregor Smart, the head of the Kirstein Business Library and Innovation Center at BPL, said. Covid taught the library the need for things like Macs with webcams, for instance, so library goers can hop on Zoom or do job interviews.

Persons: Stephanie Garcia, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Garcia, Eliza Relman, Carla Hayden, We're, Brittany Simmons, who's, TikTok, Simmons, —, Brooks Rainwater, it's, Emma Wood, That's, we're, Katie Davidovich, — we've, Davidovich, Tim Peters, Peters, Wood, Samuel Abrams, Abrams, hasn't, Rainwater, Gregor Smart, Smart, Covid Organizations: Service, of Congress, of Labor, Library of Congress, DC, Congress, Urban Libraries Council, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Capitol, College, Central Michigan University, American Enterprise Institute, New York Public, Public, Boston, Boston Public Library, Business, Innovation, BPL Locations: Wall, Silicon, Washington ,, New York, Capitol Hill, Canada

What do you think queer literature specifically has to say with its hybrid forms? Gay: I don’t think you can overlook nonfiction in talking about queer literature. Queer and trans people have, amazingly, taken that demand and subverted it, and that’s why those kinds of stories are so important. Also, Roxane, the point you were making about how some of the greatest truths of queer culture and activism have been done in nonfiction … Oddly enough, queer fiction writers have long hidden behind persona and character to write about queer culture and about themselves. I remember interviewing Galgut once and saying, “Your character Damon” — and he stopped me and said, “No, that’s not a character, that’s me.” I thought to myself, “I’m trying to protect you here,” which is a very quaint protectiveness on my part.

Persons: …, Adrienne Rich, “, ” Lorde, Lorde, ” — Tomi Obaro Soller, Roxane, I’m, we’d, Edmund White, Marcel, Proust, André Gide, Ernest, Hemingway’s, Hemingway, Ed, Gide — White, Willa Cather, Mukherjee, Damon Galgut, Damon, Galgut, Damon ” —, ”, “ I’m

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