LitHub Daily: October 21, 2015

• The future is ruining our lives, and has been for 45 years. Hal Niedzviecki on the anniversary of Future Shock. | Literary Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• Paul Holdengraber talks to sleep-deprived genius Ben Lerner about fatherhood, failure, and the poetry of both, in the latest episode of A Phone Call From Paul. | Literary Hub

• Imagining Barthes’s reaction to the scarf Hermés designed in his honor, which is “a particularly readable and mythological object.” | The New Yorker

• On Patti Smith’s genre-resistant M Train, “a most roundabout and leisurely way of answering the question ‘How have you been?’” | NYRB

• Lauren Holmes on the inevitability of vulnerability and shame, the power of words, and the beauty of subjectivity. | Electric Literature

  Article continues after advertisement
• On Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, which is not so much a slaughterhouse as it is an “upper-middle-class supermarket.” | BOMB Magazine
• In which a teenaged Marlon James listens to the Smiths, realizes how alone he is, probably cries. | WSJ
• My ticket-taker’s demon must have come back to play with my mind: a short story by Bohumil Hrabal. | Asymptote Journal
• On Walter Benjamin’s fascination with the visual, similarities to Wittgenstein, and contributions to philosophy (take that, Stanley Cavell). | The New Statesman
• “Think of the morning dream with ghosts.” A poem by Hoa Nguyen. | Academy of American Poets

Also on Literary Hub: Aaron Bady image-searches his way through the Moscow Metro (via Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground) · You think City on Fire is big? A reading list of really, really big books · A poem-a-day countdown to the Irish Arts Center Poetry Fest: day two, Lucy Ives · A poem by Khadijah Queen · On the unprecedented FDR, from History’s People by Margaret MacMillan