Interesting article in The New Yorker about artistic prodigies vs. late bloomers. [link]

Ha!

Leaving it up just because it's funny.

Try this one- the article is Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell.

[link]

Content not found on that link, Barb, but you've got to love The New Yorker's error message

Here's the link.

And in case you were wondering what were the scholarly consensus picks for the most important American poems of the 20th century, they are:

But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”

Though, frankly, that list shows the continued split of academy v. beat era and more rightly would probably include poems by Ginsberg, Creeley and Ashberry.

I love Frost. We had a wonderful debate in my Honors English class in high school about the one about gathering apples for cider. All sorts of arguments about symbolism and predestination and such.

The thing, that for me, I find most interesting about that article is that I can relate to both writing/artistic styles described. Both the honing of craft and open-ended exploration and research that Galenson attributes to the late bloomer both appeal and make sense to me as much as the "conceptual" tag he applies to the prodigies of starting with a clear idea and executing it.

Not that I'm anything approaching a genius, mind you. I can just relate to both approaches and see how I've used both in writing.

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or if it simply means I'm screwed.

Barb, if you still have them, I'd love the following for my juvie hall girls:

• Sister Chicas- Lisa Alvarado, Ann Hagman Cardinal, Jane Alberdeston Coralin (Latina YA)
• Boys That Bite- Mari Mancusi (Para YA)

GC, they're all yours. Did you want mine as well since they're YA?

Oh, hell yes!!! Totally!

Jilli, have you read Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys?

I glanced at it in the bookstore and the first story was like an elegant marriage of NIN's video for "Perfect Drug" and the Paris section of Interview With A Vampire.

Jilli, have you read Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys

Yep! They're gorgeous. Her Blood Opera series is still my favorite, but the Paradys books are lovely and overwrought in the best sort of way.