Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.
‘We Real Cool’ is probably Gwendolyn Brooks’s best-known poem. Written in 1959 and published the following year in her poetry collection The Bean Eaters, it has been widely taught in schools and anthologised on many occasions. You can read ‘We Real Cool’ here before proceeding to our analysis of Brooks’s […]
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This year, the White House continues its theme of horrifying holiday decor by imitating a hallway from The Shining. This follows the infamous 2018 hallway of blood-red trees, suggesting that the visitor has somehow wandered into a carnivorous forest. What ordinary citizens don’t know, however, is that this is part of a deliberate strategy! The White House is reviving the old tradition of telling spooky stories around Christmas, albeit through the medium of pine trees and strange ornaments. We’ve managed to get our hands on some proposals for next year’s decor.
Focusing on Shirley Jackson will bring to the forefront what we really mean by asking for a return to the family values of the 1950s: a suffocating “us or them” mentality, undergirded by homophobia, anti-semitism, and misogyny, that can only be alleviated by murder.
Wander through New England pines decorated with ornaments from Faberge’s newest line of “American Poisonous Mushrooms.” The sense of creeping unease only continues the farther you go, and you begin to see, behind the trees, all the unfriendly faces of all the townspeople that hate and fear you.
Visitors will initially complain that all tickets to see the White House Christmas display are now distributed through a lottery system, but when the tour ends in a locked room filled with large piles of rocks, the reasoning behind this will become abundantly clear.
Keep the witch hunt going all year round! Return to the values of our founders by turning the White House into an early Puritan settlement whose oppressive atmosphere terrifies visitors guilty of wrong-doing into flinging wild accusations at each other to deflect suspicion. There’s only the dark and undecorated woods, where witches may lurk, the devil is ever-present, and your fears of human sexuality twist these metaphysical terrors into real, physical forces of evil.
Return to the values of our founders by turning the White House into an early Puritan settlement.
Children will love the Kids’ Corner, where they can pile rocks on top of a stuffed Giles Corey in a Santa hat until he breaks in two. It’s edutainment!
This year we’re exchanging “ho, ho, ho,” for “Poe, Poe, Poe!” The White House will be transformed into an ancient and crumbling mansion where the leaves on all the trees are crispéd and sere, large black cats dog your footsteps, and ravens sit croaking “Nevermore!” on pallid busts of Pallas above the chamber doors.
Pry up the floorboards to find your very own red sequined heart ornament to take home. Press the button to hear it beat! Visitors can also find excellent refreshments at the end of the tour by following tour guide Montresor into the wine cellar. For god’s sake, check it out!
Christmas is a religious holiday after all! Make it somber. Fill the White House with priests from the nearby Georgetown University. Nothing gets a Christmas party started like solemn chants in Latin to drive the devil out.
Plus, this will serve as a great reminder that if the Republican repeal of Obamacare goes through, an exorcism is the best and cheapest way to treat projectile vomiting.
The Exorcist feel too Catholic? Keep religious fundamentalism at the heart of the season by repurposing the red trees from 2018! Add a white bonnet on top, in lieu of a bonnet, and boom, we’re in Gilead.
Legislatively, this administration already wants to go there. Why not make it obvious?
This year, we won’t fight over saying, “Happy Holidays!” or “Merry Christmas!” We’ll say, “Cthulhu fhtagn!” In this H.P. (it stands for HapPy) Christmas extravaganza, visitors will be transported to the sunken city of R’lyeh. Deck the halls with ornaments of vile, mind-arresting creatures marked by their fearsome and unnatural malignancy, and banners full of undecipherable characters.
Deck the halls with ornaments of vile, mind-arresting creatures marked by their fearsome and unnatural malignancy.
Visitors will love our crafts corner. (Get it?) The kids can make their own Deep Ones ornaments with sculpting clay. Combine together as many disparate animal parts as you like and take home your own eldritch horror as a fun souvenir!
Bonus: this author’s understanding of racial diversity perfectly fits this administration’s! No need to update anything for a modern audience.
This novel’s framing device, a doomed arctic voyage, inspires our plan for the bleak and desolate foyer, where one sees only the smallness of man in the vast power of uncaring nature. Then, in the usual tree hall, we’ll get kids interested in STEM at a young age by seeing how you can put together great monstrous trees by combining bits and pieces of smaller dead ones!
If they don’t want to take their awful new creations home with them, they’ll learn a valuable lesson: the sooner you can learn how to deny responsibility for your actions, the better.
The post Literary-Inspired Decoration Ideas for a Horrifying White House Christmas appeared first on Electric Literature.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry ‘The Seafarer’ is one of the earliest poems in English literature. Its ‘plot’ can be summarised easily enough: an elderly sailor speaks to us about his alienation from the world. The 124-line […]
The post On ‘The Seafarer’: An Anglo-Saxon Poem appeared first on Interesting Literature.
Temptation looms large in love poetry and religious poetry, but over the centuries, poets have described and explored the topic of temptation from a variety of different perspectives, choosing some very unusual metaphors to illustrate the dangers – or the delights – of temptation. Here are some of our favourite […]
The post The Best Poems about Temptation appeared first on Interesting Literature.
Theodore Adorno famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. The idea that the atrocities of the Holocaust can be responded to through art – and especially the idea that words can be found to respond to such horrific events – has persisted in the popular mind. And […]
The post 8 Famous Poems about the Holocaust appeared first on Interesting Literature.
Every day of the year, Electric Literature is grateful for the people who read and share what we publish. But on this Giving Tuesday, we’re coming to you with a special request: Electric Lit is aiming for 1,000 members by 2020, and we want you to be one of them. Your membership gets you discounts in our store, access to year-round submissions, and the knowledge that you’re supporting our mission to make literature more relevant, exciting, and inclusive. If that’s all you need to hear, smash that button. If you need more convincing, read on.
Electric Lit has been publishing for ten (!!) years, going from a quarterly print anthology to weekly fiction Tumblr to a robust culture website. That means we’ve outlasted a number of devastating layoffs and heartbreaking closures in the media world: the Awl, the Hairpin, and Topic (not profitable enough), The Toast (saw the writing on the wall), Gawker (got on the wrong guy’s bad side), Splinter (owned by idiots), Deadspin (“didn’t stick to sports” and owned by idiots), and Pacific Standard (question mark). We take no joy in this, though we’re glad to still be here. What it means, though, is that as culture and commentary sites fall to capitalistic concerns, we feel more and more serious about our responsibility to bring you thoughtful, illuminating work that situates books and stories in the context of our challenging political moment. And, let’s be honest, we also feel worried about the future.
We don’t answer to VCs or any other big funder. All we have is you.
We know there are a million demands on your money, especially now. (Especially today!) Your preferred primary candidate wants it. The ACLU and RAICES and all the other causes clamoring for your support want it, and they deserve it. It can feel sometimes like you’re just throwing donations at every problem and they’re all still getting worse. But this is a situation where your funds truly go a long way. We are a tiny nonprofit with no academic affiliation or major funder, and we’re used to stretching every buck. If just a thousand of you—under a quarter of a percent of our monthly readers!—are able to dedicate just $5 per month—one single fancy coffee drink!—you can make a real, measurable contribution to our continued survival. At a time when other culture sites are having their plugs pulled for being too political, for not making enough money, or just for no reason at all, that means a lot. We don’t answer to VCs or any other big funder who can do us dirty that way. All we have is you.
I know the “one coffee drink per month” thing is a little cliche, so here are a few other points of comparison:
This is cheap at twice the price, and it means everything to us. Your support lets us invest in our writers, offer security to our staff, and commit every day to bringing you high-quality writing that wrestles with the important questions of our time.
Ready to join yet?
Or do you want to read some of the nice things highly celebrated writers have said about EL?
National Book Award winner Susan Choi:
Electric Literature is the bookstore open at 3 a.m. for the insomniac in bed; it’s the book group for the lonely non-joiner; it’s the literary website your jaded teenage kids try to read over your shoulder; it’s a godsend for the procrastinating syllabus-writer; it is remaking the canon, it is expanding the community, it is blasting the dust away, it is lighting everything up and offering the words for the new vividness – why do you think they call it ELECTRIC? Marvel at it, feast from it, and for God’s sake support it!
Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell:
Electric Literature is where I go to be delighted. Also: haunted, elevated, provoked, frightened, inspired. It’s jungle-lush with strange, amazing life, and an essential part of our contemporary literary biodiversity. … I’ve discovered so many favorite stories here, recommended by authors I love; every semester I teach Electric Literature original fiction. What an oasis it has been for me and so many other readers and writers—predictably surprising, darkly illuminating, and perhaps the best paradox of all: a genuine virtual community. I subscribed, and I have to say, what you get is much better than a novelty T-shirt. It’s reliable astonishment, a thousand ways to be amazed at what words in a row can accomplishment, how they root into readers and transform the whole ecosystem of thought, ramify into action. Let’s keep it going and growing.
National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado:
I have been publishing on and off in Electric Literature since 2016. It’s a magazine that is near and dear to my heart, not only for its incredible fiction and essays, but its commitment to all literature, regardless of genre, and its willingness to tackle difficult, important political conversations in the literary world. Electric Literature has published three pieces that I have either authored or participated in—each of these projects pushed boundaries, disrupted forms, and created a stir—and I know I wouldn’t have been able to find a home for them anywhere else.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai:
Electric Lit is electric, and lit, and electrically lit, a jolt of magic and reason and beauty and wonder and chaos and order and wisdom. We need those things like we need air, and we need Electric Literature to thrive.
Join their ranks by joining our ranks today.
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