The Atlantic Considers a 'Rime' for the Digital Era

James Parker's latest article at The Atlantic draws readers' attention to The Ancient Mariner Big Read, a streaming digital-interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem co-curated by Philip Hoare, Angela Cockayne, and Sarah Chapman, commissioned by the University of Plymouth. When complete, the adaptation will encompass 40 free installments with accompanying visuals by 40 different readers and artists, including Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Beth Gibbons (of Portishead), Yinka Shonibare, and Duane Slick, all inflecting the Romantic text with their own unique style. "Lovingly curated, exquisitely produced, the 'Ancient Mariner' Big Read was three years in the making," Parker explains. More:

It just happens to have dropped with eerie appropriateness right into our thirsty and atomized pandemical condition: people, people everywhere, nor anyone you can hug. […]

Listening to the poem, taking the trip, we shift and flicker. Now we are the wedding guest, rearing back in horror from the possessed storyteller; now we are the storyteller himself, the mariner, in the spine of his vision. He will return, of course, “a sadder and a wiser man.” “Is there an antecedent,” Hoare wondered, “a literary antecedent, to the ‘Rime’ as an exploration of loneliness, in the modern existential sense? I don’t think so.”

We know what we'll be watching this weekend! Read on at The Atlantic.