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February 09, 2010

The Second Virtue

"The hostess should think out a pleasant scheme of decoration, in harmony with the prevailing colour of the dining-room, the flowers in season, the vases and bowls at her disposal, the dress she is to wear, and even the food she will offer." 

I don’t know how this book appeared on my shelves and on picking it up in curiosity, wondering if it would be suitable to sell, the cover didn’t look very promising for a series, however loosely, hooked on book design. But I was immediately struck by the monochrome prints inside and their comic-book-inspired aesthetic. Depicting all sorts of indoor party games -- including "Lemon Golf" and "Spoon Hockey" -- these quite hilarious but rather stylish illustrations drew me into the book. The Home Entertainer is packed with how-to diagrams and design tips on "the art of successful entertaining" -- from curling celery for garnishing, and cutting "toast shapes for entrée dishes," to constructing an elaborate theatre set in the back garden, complete with footlights. 

I love the democratic, Do-It-Yourself ethos of the book, and especially Hedges’s friendly pieces of advice: "Set a high standard of taste and originality, but not of extravagance. Ostentation and extravagance show the worst of taste, but on the other hand, never apologise for, or boast of the cheapness of your party." Another amusing piece of advice, Hedges’ outré suggestions on matching the colour of food, dress, and decorative scheme really encapsulate the design consciousness of the book. The notion of the decorative scheme as a total work of art also reminded me of the controlling tendencies of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who created a whole new wardrobe for one of his clients, so that her clothes would harmonise with the house he had designed.  

Above all, the comic-book style images and the emphasis on DIY reminded me of a magazine launched in the 1950s called The Practical Householder. I recently picked up a complete collection of these magazines, a series responding to the growing popularity of the Do-It-Yourself philosophy and, indeed, to the coining of that phrase. The covers are fabulous, brightly coloured depictions of contemporary 1950s interiors, following the same couple as they embark, often with a cigarette or pipe artfully balanced, on a different exploit in home improvement each month. On the cover of a 1957 issue, which I’m now regretting having sold, the living room is festooned with garlands and balloons, the couple standing triumphant in matching party frock and tux, in front of a gleaming cocktail bar. I can only hope that they celebrated this tasteful edition to the room with a festive game of Lemon Golf.  

Brazilian writer and translator Fabio Fernandes writes about the dangers of translation lag, and how not having access to innovative literature written in other languages can cause a nation's own literature to stall and get stagnant.

Thomas Benton updates his recent essay about the trap of humanities graduate school programs, about why abandoning "the life of the mind" might be the best way to survive. (Link via Jen Howard.)

Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

I wrote a not very nice column about Jeff VanderMeer's book BookLife, although it was less about the book and more about fatigue. Anyway, Jeff asked if he could interview me about my response to his book, about the writing world, and other things as well, and the result is here.

When do you think a writer crosses the line between helping a publisher sell their book and entering into a cycle destructive to their creativity?

We’ve seen writers become really unhinged last year, responding to their critics in these really embarrassing ways. Alain de Botton, Alice Hoffman, whoever else. A writer wrote one of my reviewers who had been critical of him and called her a “cunt.” That’s destructive to his creativity, because if I ever run into him, I am going to tear out his throat with my teeth.

So what do you do when you're heartbroken? I mean, besides refuse to get out of bed and dunk oreos into whiskey and all sorts of other unhealthy things. This is why god gave us Daphne du Maurier. And thank god for Daphne du Maurier. Because not only did she write the saucy Jamaica Inn, she was rather saucy herself, rolling her eyes at that attempt to make a feminist retelling of Rebecca, where Rebecca was kind and good, it was her philandering husband that drove her to act out.

On one occasion, she was slightly annoyed to read some comments by Antonia Fraser in a newspaper. The gist of these comments was that everyone had misunderstood the novel Rebecca. In Ms Fraser’s opinion, Rebecca was really good whereas Max was a rotter and his second wife was no good either...

“Have you read Antonia’s novel, Quiet as a Nun?” Daphne asked. When I shook my head, she continued. “Read it, and let me know what you think. I think she ought to stick to writing biographies.”

February 08, 2010

For the first time since World War II, Mein Kampf will be published in Germany in 2015.

February 05, 2010

I have absolutely no idea why I'll be reading a scary-sounding neurological experiment and suddenly think, "I wonder if I can volunteer for that." All the stories in The Master and His Emissary of people having one hemisphere knocked out, or the corpus collum shut down, or parts of the brain numbed or lit up only made me want to become a lab rat.

This article by Hannah Devlin about having sections of her brain turned off is not helping! I'm thinking, "Hm, I wonder how I can track down her doctor. And will my insurance cover it?"

First thought: "Huh, I wonder why I removed DoubleX from my bookmarks, it's not like everything on that site was a freak show, sometimes they had okay content."

Read: "Sex addiction is a feminist victory."

Second thought: "Is there any way I can block this site from my browser, so that I never, ever go there again?"

Sir David Attenborough talks to Nature in these videos about Darwin, birds, Genesis, continental drift, and the optimism of evolution.

More American Moderns, and oh my god Emma Goldman wrote some dirty letters. "Darling lover, champion f, just 4 more days and then and then and then. Every nerve is tense, my t is hot and burning with the desire to run it up and down w. My m scream in delight and my brain is on fire." Good lord, I would not have guessed she had it in her.

Speaking of the Moderns, the Brits, who were way less hot and way more spoiled (as well as being way better writers and painters), but Vivian Gornick has an essay at the Boston Review about one of them. Edward Carpenter is the subject of a new biography, and Gornick hopes it restores Carpenter to a place among the most famous of the moderns, like Goldman and Virginia Woolf.

February 04, 2010

Drunken Boat 11 has gone online, featuring an interview with Kay Ryan (plus a handful of poems), and many other goodies besides. From the interview: You know, my poems have patches of different kinds of rhythm in them. They may have a rhythm and then maybe a counter-rhythm. There's nothing that I could exactly name, but I do have a strong sense of when a line is rhythmically right or wrong, and I will change it to get the rhythm right, but I couldn’t exactly tell you what it was. I like things to clunk sometimes; I like to have a patch that’ll go 'thunk,' and then I'll like something that--I don’t know--might be iambic or have some other foot to it for a bit.

Speaking of rhythm: If turns out to be impossible to make poetic scansion cool, rather than simply necessary, Herbert Tucker's new site, For Better For Verse, won't be to blame. There's an absurd amount of fun in marking up the feet and stresses in the poems selected.

Del Marbrook considers Leadbelly alongside Blake and George Chapman. His conclusion? More Leadbelly! Leadbelly wrote about Franklin Roosevelt, Adolph Hitler, the Scottsboro Boys, Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes, racism and poverty. If you had listened to his songs in his lifetime you would have known more about what was really going on than if you had stayed glued to your Philco or the ubiquitous newspapers. He was no talking head. He was doing what poets should be doing, what poets are doing: saying something some of us want desperately to hear and others of us don`t want to hear at all. (via 3am Magazine)

UbuWeb's featured resources for February are chosen by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry. (Read Jessa's interview with Wiman in the March 2009 issue.)

The Rumpus has some lovely illustrations from a 1935 edition of Les Fleurs du mal.

Austin Kleon has started a site entirely devoted to newspaper blackout poetry. He probably has a book coming out in April or something . . . .

I have a new Smart Set column, on Spinster Fear, and a defense of Elizabeth Gilbert. So there's that.

Spinster fear is a serious stressor. And it's not just Gottlieb. An entire industry of self-help books, sitcoms, romantic comedies, seminars, scientific studies, magazines, and Web sites are designed to pressure you about your marriagability. "Don't waste the pretty!" He's Just Not That Into You said, reminding us that our attractiveness is an asset with an expiration date. "You're more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than get married after 40!" Newsweek famously declared. "Better have your babies now, while you still can!" yelled 60 Minutes. And in the middle of all that, one woman cried out, "Fuck this." She decided she didn't want the life of so many women — the ones buying the Gottlieb book — want: the marriage, the house in the suburbs, motherhood. She wanted something else, but she had no idea what that something else was. And that led Elizabeth Gilbert to her bathroom floor, depressed and suicidal, sobbing night after night. But I think that's what some depressive episodes are: the soul going on strike, or yelling, "Fuck this." Gilbert finally made it off the floor, got a divorce, and figured out a way to keep herself alive while she restructured her life. Being a writer, she wrote a book about it. And it sold millions and millions of copies and made Elizabeth Gilbert a household name.

Then the backlash began.

I am a little nostalgic for the era of Christine Stansell's American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, despite not being alive for it. It's a great book, and one longs for the newness of print, of conversation, of the editor of The Masses declaring, "Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free," or the editor of The Little Review to write, "For God's sake, why doesn't someone start a revolution?"

Although my favorite part is the writers' response to the Comstock laws. They were originally put in place to prohibit the distribution of information about birth control, but Comstock made it his mission to start banning books. For the sake of decency and all that. The writers organized a protest and showed up at the committee's office to read their material aloud and request immediate feedback as to whether the work is okay to go to print.

It would be nice for some brainy, witty person to come up with a suitable protest for Amazon.

More Intelligent Life on Salinger's "spoiled children," the readers who thought they were entitled to demand new books from the writer.

Their plan was to rent a couple of cars and drive up to Cornish, find his house and deliver their message to him. This visit was to be preceded by a letter to Mr Salinger warning him of their impending visit (but leaving the date of their visit vague so that he would not know when to expect them). I read a version of their letter-an imploring manifesto asking for more of the stories that had already affected their lives so deeply.

I found this trip to be a bad idea, and I told my friend so. I recall having a spiteful little thought: that I would have preferred it if these artists had chosen some other writer, perhaps any other writer, and gone to his house to urge him never to publish anything ever again. That is a manifesto I would have enjoyed.

NPR is running my review of Stephen Benatar's Wish Her Safe at Home. Another NYRB book. I got the NYRB catalog in the mail, started marking books I would like to read, and realized it would fill the next six months of my life. NYRB, stop publishing these books, I have other things to do, god damn it. Anyway, Wish Her Safe at Home is awesome, you should read it.

The BBC sort of catches you up on the whole Stieg Larsson world: the fighting over his estate, the film adaptations, the controversy over whether he actually wrote those novels, etc.

February 03, 2010

Slate on the slow death of Harper's Magazine.

Editing this new issue of Bookslut made both Jessa and me a little punch-drunk. And by "punch-drunk," I mean "drunk on punch." And by "punch," I mean "a bowl of cheap vodka with Crystal Light lemonade powder packets mixed in." Don't judge us. You got your magazine, didn't you?

But yeah: new issue of Bookslut! This month, we're featuring interviews with Iain McGilchrist, Zachary German, Nate Pritts, David Shields, Maryse Condé, and Jason Koo. We've got several must-read features (I'm not kidding; they're legally mandatory): The completely awesome Elizabeth Bachner considers Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg; the incredibly cool Colleen Mondor dissects the whitewashing of middle grade and young adult book covers; and rock star Barbara J. King (whose brand new book Being with Animals you should be reading right now) looks at the anthropological education of author Peter Rudiak-Gould. And if you're a poet, you'll want to check out the beautiful poetry portfolio by the brilliant Linh Dinh. Do it now! The dude at the counter can wait for his mocha latte.

We've got new columns, of course, from our Bookslut In Training, Comicbookslut, Cookbookslut, Latin Lit Lover, and the always awesomely-named Kissing Dead Girls. And you'll find reviews of the latest books from Adam Haslett, Emma Straub, Douglas Kearney, Marisa Meltzer, Lee Upton, Elizabeth Marie Young, and Martin Page. We're also debuting a new review section called Past Perfect, which will feature our reviewers' takes on backlist titles worth checking out -- in our first entry, Cass Daubenspeck takes a look at a title from Muriel Barbery.

So have fun, and thanks for reading! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Booksluts? Who dat? Seriously. Who? This is not rhetorical; I am genuinely curious. (Sorry. Still feeling that punch a little bit.)

I very much enjoyed chatting with Iain McGilchrist for the new issue, and wandering around online (trying to avoid a book I'm supposed to be reading), I found a documentary he participated in, "Soul Searching." It examines the scientific search for the soul and consciousness, and that weird turn philosophy took when it decided there was no such thing as "the self." You can watch it online.

The problems of updating Jane Austen: Adam Kirsch on Cathleen Schine's The Three Weissmanns of Westport, which is a contemporary take on Sense and Sensibility.

(I don't care for Jane Austen, but I know how much work those books do. I can admire her sharpness and comprehensiveness while still being bored. And when people take on Austen, they always seem to focus exclusively on the relationships, while leaving out the social conformity and economics of the writing. But you know. Mr. Darcy looks good in a wet shirt, blah blah blah.)

When Bill Martin, author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, was confused with Bill Martin, author of Ethical Marxism, Brown Bear was banned by the Texas Board of Education. (Oh Amazon, your shitty search function will be the death of us all.) Dad Wagon interviews the godless Marxist. (Link via The Morning News.)

Randi Hutter Epstein talks to Fresh Air about her (such a badly titled) book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, how germ theory saved mothers' lives, and the inconvenience of delivering babies when the male doctor was not allowed to see the woman naked.

(When they start talking about forceps, all I can think about is Dead Ringers. "These are for the mutant women.")

February 02, 2010

Editing the new issue takes away all of my brain power, which is why, I guess, I found the liter of milk I bought today on my window sill and the loaf of bread on my bed. It's a good thing the issue goes up tomorrow, or I'd accidentally eat my shoe.

So go, get ready for Lost (thank God for the internet, I think Germany has yet to start season 5), and we'll have a new issue and blog posting written with full brain capacity. I don't know what that sentence even means.

This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Pregnant Widow by Patient Zero Martin Amis.

Did the upper classes have a genetic monopoly on beauty? Or would they sag, much as the careers of writers with a genetic inheritance who found success young and whose only retreat was self-parody?

"This afternoon I remembered very vividly that incident with the taxi-driver in Paris in 1936, and was going to have written something about it in this diary. But now I feel so saddened that I can’t write it. Everything is disintegrating. It makes me writhe to be writing book-reviews etc at such a time, and even angers me that such time-wasting should still be permitted . . . . At present I feel as I felt in 1936 when the Fascists were closing in on Madrid, only far worse. But I will write about the taxi-driver sometime."

DJ Taylor on George Orwell's diaries.

February 01, 2010

The new Lost Man Booker award is a kind of fantastically bonkers idea made up by the hard-working, never-sleeping, all-dancing Booker Prize marketing department. The back story is agreeably demented. When the Booker prize rules were fiddled around with in the opening of the Seventies, after PH Newby's storming inaugural victory in '69 with the now out-of-print Something to Answer For, they misplaced the long list for the in-between books.

The award aims to commemorate the works that "fell through the net" in 1970 after changes to the Booker rules. In 1971, two years after the prize was first given, it ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became, as it is now, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication.

It's a cracking list, ranging from a sea shanty to police procedurals to the wankathon of Brian Aldiss. (That's not snark, that's what the book is about.)

Continue reading >>

The Second Virtue

Sliced up strips of Le Corbusier’s printed works, reproduced in brightly coloured horizontal bands, wrap around the cover of de Smet’s book, evoking the construction of paper chains. Architect of Books traces the construction and reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s identity as an architect, artist and urban planner, represented, rethought and reformulated through the art of book design. De Smet examines Le Corbusier’s creation of an imagined unity, taking place on the printed page -- by means of montage, superimposition, sampling and salvage -- between the diverse fields of the architect’s oeuvre: painting, town planning, building, furniture design, sculpture. Le Corbusier linked typographical art -- questions of layout, format, paper and typeface -- to the art of architecture, and the construction of books and of buildings occurred simultaneously, each impacting on the other, throughout his life’s work.

From his very first publications in the 1920s, Le Corbusier was equally concerned with what Paul Valéry termed the ‘second virtue’ of a book, its "physique," the book’s visual and physical expressiveness as a "volume." However, it was not until after the Second World War that the architect’s understanding of a synthesis of the arts, and of his own practice, could truly come to fruition on the page, when new printing technology allowed for the greater play of text, images and layout. In preparing New World Space (1948), for example, Le Corbusier advocated, "On the same page fragments of painting with fragments of a façade and luscious gouaches with prints and plans of facades." It was during this post war period that Le Corbusier determined to raise the genre of architectural monograph to the level of artist’s book, handling the printed page itself as an artistic medium: handwritten notes might be enlarged and placed next to sketches, and those sketches alongside photographs of finished projects, or flat shapes of colour overlaid on drawings of urban development, treating them as prints. However, this was not to say that the book itself should be considered an art object; Le Corbusier was no bibliophile, considering books first and foremost as a means of dissemination and, equally importantly, as machine-made objects. Hand-cutting pages was anathema in a "machine society," and Le Corbusier condemned his publisher for producing an edition of one his books on handmade paper in limited number: "the lavish paper discredits everything." 

Seemingly at odds with this anti-bibliophile position, a very curious decision of Le Corbusier’s to cover a book with fur recalls the architect’s avant-garde use of diverse imagery -- photographs, clippings from sales catalogues, adverts and magazines -- in order to "dazzle the reader’s eyes." These weird juxtapositions, on the same page or facing pages, of apparently unrelated images culled from daily life, a parade of visual surprises, have an affinity to Surrealist shock tactics: revealing previously unseen connections. Overlooked by de Smet, Le Corbusier’s bizarre decision to cover his copy of Don Quixote in the fur of his dead pet dog (‘Pinceau’1933-1945) apparently brings him closer to a Surrealist position, despite the architect’s well-known hostility towards André Breton and Surrealism in general. This affinity between them appears in connection to Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim’s "Breakfast in Fur," a fur covered cup, saucer and spoon produced in 1936. By covering these ubiquitous, standardised objects with fur, Oppenheim defied logical expectations. The cup, saucer and spoon appeared to be made of bristly fur rather than smooth porcelain and polished metal, rebuffing assumptions of rationality and utility in the mass-produced object and instead evoking sexuality and desire. While Le Corbusier vaunted the printed book as a paradigmatic mass-produced, machine-made object, his Don Quixote, covered in the shaggy fur of a dog named "Brush," belies this obsession with standardisation and utility, emerging as a humorously absurd twin to the bristly breakfast cup.

The sister of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya talks to the Telegraph. A collection of Politkovskaya's work has recently been released, Nothing but the Truth.

“She was so persistent because she felt she only had power as a journalist, and the authorities had to deal with it if she wrote it. So there were people who didn’t like her writing about it. The Russian special police forces threatened to kill her and sent letters to her and her editor, because she was writing about what they were doing in Chechnya, which was extremely cruel.”

"Richard from Texas" is joining the ranks of People Mentioned in Eat Pray Love that are now writing their own memoirs. EPL should just be its own publishing company and it can churn out a memoir from everyone in the book. What is her hot Italian language tutor doing with his life? Let's find out in his new book!

January 31, 2010

When will I learn not to take Dan Rhodes books out into public? At some point I will laugh out loud, possibly snort if I'm trying too hard to keep quiet, and people look at me. It is an interesting sociological experiment: which city responds better to a crazy laughing person on the public transportation, Chicago or Berlin? Although in both cities, people feel free to stare at you all the time, so even if you're not laughing out loud you're pretty sure you have something on your face, or your lipstick is smeared, or they are plotting your death right now.

So new Dan Rhodes! About a museum about suicide, only instead of helping people understand that life is worth living, it has become a magnet to the depressed and the curator has to get rid of body after body. It's reviewed at the Guardian.

January 29, 2010

Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism probably simply suffers from bad timing. In the time it took from the book to be written, edited, printed, and put on the market, the feminist dialogue kind of changed. I'm guessing that the recession has seen the decline of attendance in Strippercise classes (Martha Stewart notwithstanding) and Brazilian waxes are probably prioritized below health insurance premiums. And so a tirade against things like this being labeled as feminism now seems hopelessly outdated.

This Guernica interview with Sheryl WuDunn, one of the writers of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is where the conversation is right now: global rights, microlending, preventive care, maternal health and infant mortality, etc. (Human Rights Watch even recently smacked down Ireland for its chaotic abortion policy, accusing them of creating a "culture of shame.") For some reason, it's just hard to care about a woman who wants to give her boyfriend a lap dance after all that.

Oh right. This horrid thing exists now.

Dear Michael Schaub: If you get this book in the mail as a review book, I suggest using the haz mat safety guide I sent you for proper disposal.

Barbara J King is interviewed about her new book Being with Animals, why your cat chooses the arm you just hurt as the place she lies, and early man's response to animals on the Jeff Farias show. (Link to podcast archive here, it's the January 25th show.)

The Naked and the Read

Among the most dizzying elements of new love: the way it makes you feel like some new life is unfolding for you, the way reality as you knew it before gets fractured and expands, new doors, new paths, new world, all the rest. Everything dryland and familiar, the inhale before the plunge, and suddenly you’re horizontal, weightless in the water, scared and thrilled, some new human swimming in you.

Drenched, Marisa Matarazzo’s debut collection of lush, entwined short stories, due out in a couple weeks from Soft Skull Press, explores these moments, swims to the warm wet depths of them. “Stories of Love and Other Deliriums” is the subtitle and oh, how well she captures the deliriums. Her stories edge against fairy tale and fable -- the way Kelly Link and Aimee Bender (who blurbs the book) combine the familiar and fantastic -- but Matarazzo's concern is more explicitly erotic.

A man with quartz teeth that heat when he’s turned on burns his young lover’s lips. A couple who live in a bomb shelter infuse Jello-O with love power and sell the recipe to Target. A woman wears ash trays taped over her breasts. Babysitters instigate a sexual frenzy. Two teenagers raise themselves up the mast of a ship in a potent nautical romp. Matarazzo’s are sex myths, love legends, wacky at times, and fantastical, and more than anything, arresting and arousing, truly.

Matarazzo is at her best when describing the beginnings of love, the moments that brew before the main event, when the site of your crush, your beloved is still “like cellular pyromania.” It’s that singular pleasure-torture of anticipation and imagination, when the build-up outflames the actual thing itself. “Those flush and moiling moments of almost touching or just touching that seethe with a locomotive chug towards sex... were richly best.”

In “Hangdangling,” Whaler and Sailor, a teenage boy and girl respectively, work at the aquarium, where Whaler’s had his arm scarred by a senile shark, and the two have after-hours sex in “the darkest corner of the jellyfish exhibit” and keep their love a secret: “This is one of the best aspects of their young love lives. Secrets, particularly love secrets, sauce and fatten the love soup.” Later, the pair fix themselves to the mast of a sailboat, suspended “an inch of air between them”:

Why? Why do they do it this way? Because barely touching sucks from the whole sky and the whole earth the simmering sense of soon that swells in the body to make all of everything in life feel worthwhile. Because to capture and suspend those moments of barely touching is a marvelment of love.

Continue reading >>

January 28, 2010

More Romantic-era treasures in a junk shop: A letter from Robert Burns's widow, purchased for $75 (!) last year in New York, has just been donated to the National Library of Scotland. (The BBC has a nifty display that lets you read the letter.)

Alice Twemlow explains "the poetics of amateur product reviews": The reviews that go beyond the standard fare on Amazon are those that, like Dyer’s vignettes, evoke worlds in which absurd products, like a self-flushing cat toilet, make sense.

Carol Ann Duffy is organizing a literary Live Aid to raise money for Haiti: It didn't seem enough to do the usual thing and get my credit card out, and I wondered if we could do something bigger than that, and being a poet, a poetry reading was the only thing I could think of. As part of the PR for it, has nominated the Arctic Monkeys as the latest band whose lyrics are really poetry. She meant The Hold Steady, but it's hard to hold it against her.

This week the Guardian is reviewing the Romantic poets; most of the essays are interesting--in particular Margaret Drabble has a characteristic appreciation of Wordsworth: Wordsworth was perhaps the most sober of the great romantics, a water drinker, a walker of the hills, an exemplary family man who had put behind him (though he had not denied) a youthful indiscretion and an illegitimate daughter.

The terms you learn at poetry readings in Chicago.

He probably won't be waiting on line for an iPad, but nature poet Gary Snyder has written a charming poem about his Apple laptop: Because it is poky when cold,/ Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents

There are as many biographies of Joan of Arc as there are of Abraham Lincoln. But the New Republic argues that Larissa Juliet Taylor's The Virgin Warrior is the one you want.

Yale University Press was criticized pretty strongly for its decision not to reprint the Muhammad cartoons in its book about the incident, Jytte Klausen's The Cartoons That Shook the World. The word "coward" was thrown around. Klausen is interviewed about the process of seeing her book to publication, and the gag order she was asked to sign. (via The Morning News)

My idea was not to engage the provocation of: "Do I now dare to print these bad pictures or not?" That would never be my purpose. My purpose was to get the whole page from the newspaper as it was reprinted that day. There have been many misunderstandings and often the online versions of the cartoons have incorrect translations of the captions. In the book, and it was written with this purpose, I ask the reader to put on different glasses and look at the images and analyse them from the vantage point of the different arguments that were made against and for the cartoons at the time. What would a Danish reader see? What did the cartoonist intend to show? Why would a secular Muslim say they were Islamaphobic? Why would a religious Muslim say they were blasphemous? These are all different readings of the meaning of the cartoons and I wanted my readers to look at how no illustrations, and no caricature, is read in the absence of context. And I do describe some of them actually as anti-Semitic in a classical European style.

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass.

One day, Richard Powers will write a novel based on the neurological disorder that is afflicting Martin Amis, a rare form of aphasia: the intellectual writer, a little past his prime, yes, but whose mind is alert and all too aware that when he opens his mouth to say brilliant, thoughtful things, his words come out as brittle scandalmongering. Oh, to be a great man trapped in the body of a dick! The pain of never getting your true words across, no matter how you try. If it's any consolation, Mr. Amis, they will probably name this terrible disorder after you. One day there may even be a cure, and your reputation will be restored. Way, way after your death.

January 27, 2010

Jesus fucking Christ. I am trying to find things to read that will convince me life is worth living through another week of snow, but instead I'm finding a 30-minute interview with the author of The Last Train from Hiroshima: Survivors Look Back and a story about the (innocent) scientists that the FBI drove to suicide or alcoholism during the anthrax investigations.

Let's see if watching Dinosaur Ballet again will keep me away from the whiskey bottle.

The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math author Steven Strogatz is interviewed at Seed. Bonus: math jokes.

How can you tell if a mathematician’s an extrovert? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.

Another oppressively cold and gray day in Berlin. I am self-medicating with Dinosaur Ballet and cooking from this cookbook (which has quickly become the source of my favorite winter food).

January 26, 2010

Christopher Reid's collection, A Scattering, is about his wife, their marriage, and her death, and it is a helluva book and I kind of don't know what the TS Eliot prize types were thinking but that's fine, the moment I start looking for justice in the field of literary awards is the moment I cut the cord to Mother Internet and go live in a cave.
Reid has just won the Award Formerly Known As Whitbread, the Costa. He beat 'bridesmaid' Colm Tóibín to the £30,000 prize, fair enough too as there is not money in the Costa empire enough to make Colm Tóibín happy.

Today is apparently the day I get goopy about Bookslut's contributors. Barbara J. King's new book Being with Animals: Why We Are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World is released today. Barbara has been writing for Bookslut for years and years, and she has become a dear friend. I wish her all the success in the world, and I'm very proud and happy that I get to read her essays every month. Congratulations.

Molly Haskell, author of Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited has a piece at the Wall Street Journal called "James Cameron's Plantation in the Sky" about the news that Avatar could replace GWtW as the most successful movie of all time and examining how they are similar. It opens with the question I have been wondering: "Do I have to see Avatar?" (I am considering seeing it dubbed into German. That way: pretty effects, and the whole "unobtainium" bullshit doesn't have to hurt my brain.)

"But Love and Art are blind to such petty ­differences, and with a toss of her golden mane, Lady Antonia swiftly dismisses them."

Totally bitchy review of Lady Antonia Frasier's memoir about her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go? at the Times.

But: can we stop blaming wives for the downfall in writers' and artists' creativity please? What lazy bullshit is that?

Michael Schaub reviews Patti Smith's Just Kids over at NPR.org.

For those familiar with Smith's edgy brand of rock 'n' roll or Mapplethorpe's explicit, homoerotic photography, the sweet and naive couple in Just Kids might come as a shock. The two moved in together shortly after meeting, bonding over art, making small and sweet gifts for each other, promising never to be apart. Later, they would rent a room at the Chelsea Hotel, meeting some of their artistic heroes — the musicologist Harry Smith, Jefferson Airplane banshee Grace Slick, members of Andy Warhol's Factory. Smith writes about Mapplethorpe with such authentic sweetness and wistful tenderness it's impossible not to be drawn in by the young couple's adoration of each other. Even when they're faced with adversity — poverty, rejection, Mapplethorpe's decision to make extra money as a street hustler — the reader can't help but be taken in by the ardor of their love.

Smith was also on Fresh Air recently to talk about the book.

The London Review of Books is monstrously in debt, and it is primarily being funded now by its heiress editor. It's long been wondered what would happen to the review once the editor leaves, as there's no obvious choice as a replacement. Now it looks like a harder job to fill: must be a brilliant editor, also the heir to a fortune.

(Also, perhaps the best part of the story is that the LRB is called a "fortnightly" rather than biweekly publication. I am going to start using that word despite not being British, because I am a pretentious asshole.)

I am interviewed at Fringe about stuff. How did Bookslut get started, why is your hair doing that in your head shot, if you could make out with one dead writer, who would it be? Or, actually, only the first question. Mostly I talk about how awesome Michael Schaub is.

January 25, 2010

The Second Virtue

Introducing a new series on book design, by Catherine Gregg

I found this 1940 Pelican on Modern Architecture poking out of a box of books left in the street. I enjoyed looking at it propped up on a shelf for a long time before I actually read it – the fate of many an old Pelican or Penguin with a good-looking cover. But quite the opposite impulse lay behind the establishment of Penguin Books, which was to encourage more people to open the cover and read. Founded in 1935 on the principle of providing cheap but attractive reprints of fiction and biography in paperback, Penguin Books aimed to make good quality reading material accessible to a wider public. The introduction of the Pelican series in 1937, dedicated to original writing in non-fiction, marked a new departure for the fledgling paperback imprint. The original covers, designed by Edward Young (an office junior), were simple, clean and direct, divided into three horizontal sections, with Eric Gill’s new (1927-28) sans serif typeface used for titles, and colour-coded panels indicating subject matter. Young’s confidently modern and instantly recognizable cover design revealed its full impact when it came to marketing the new publisher, attracting stockists beyond traditional booksellers, and inspiring new readers and book-buyers with striking displays. Penguin Books proved adept at getting the right balance between style and content, while maintaining the principle of a low cover price. In tune with the needs of the day, the Penguin philosophy echoed the progressive spirit of the modern movement in architecture as Richards describes it. Addressing himself to the interested ‘Man in the Street’, at whom all Pelicans were aimed, and to whose needs all good architecture should attend, Richards identifies modern architecture as a ‘social art’, like that of paperback publishing, ‘related to the life of the people it serves, not an academic exercise in applied ornament’ (the leather and gilt of hardback).

Ironically, while the Modernist architecture of the 1930s which still stands does so as a testament to the beauty of form and practical utility over fussy applied decoration, the democratic impulse of architecture as ‘social art’ has been lost as many buildings intended as affordable social housing are purloined, and their prices inflated, by the wealthy looking for ‘architect-designed’ status. To an extent this has happened at Maxwell Fry’s 1938 Kensal House, depicted on the cover of Richards’ book, where only a proportion of flats remain council tenanted. Similarly ironic, Penguin originals are often bought today simply as ornaments for the bookshelf, to be displayed as decoration rather than read. Reminding me recently of Pope’s baron in The Rape of the Lock, buying books by the yard as showpieces, I sold a load of original Penguins to a man who wanted to use them as stylish supports to hold up his bookshelves. And they are undeniably beautiful objects, complete in themselves, with the proportions of a Golden Section rectangle and perfect dimensions for the pocket. Early editions also carried adverts on the back and inside covers, an initiative for keeping down the cover price, now frame-worthy in isolation.

But while Penguin fiction titles can be read in newer formats, the original Pelicans, as a non-fiction series dealing with topics of the day, are products of their time in a way that restricts continuous reprints. For the same reason, Pelicans make amusing reads for the interested ‘Man in the Street’ today, in terms of both language and political sentiment.  Richards describes his task in fantastic period idiom, as the ‘laying aside’ of certain ‘bogeys’ hampering the acceptance of Modernist architecture in the late 1930s, notions that it was the art of ‘Bolshies’ or ‘stuntmongers’, and concerns that its principles of social service were being undermined by commercial ‘vulgarisers’ of the movement. In 1940, the date of publication, post-war reconstruction was already on the mind, and proponents of Modernism viewed the principal methods of scientific investigation, coherent planning and design attuned to need, as the only way to rebuild a more equitable and healthy society. Illustrated with plans, diagrams, and photographs showing the ‘best’ examples of modern architecture at the time, the book functions as educational propaganda for the cause.

The pulpy paper on which Penguins and Pelicans were printed gives the photographs of these empty buildings a dramatic, ghostly quality, like old newspaper clippings. Along with low grade paper, the massive print runs and short turn around from typescript to bookshop meant little time for quality control, which perhaps accounts for the staples used to bind the pages in my copy of Modern Architecture, rather than the customary sewn and glued binding. Churned out in their millions, these essentially disposable objects are now fetishised in a way that seems at odds with the values they once embodied. Likewise, Modernist buildings are left either to decay or held up as fetishes, enshrined as monuments but impractical for contemporary usage. An apt example is Tecton’s 1934 Penguin Pool at London Zoo, where Edward Young made his initial sketches for the publishing logo. Now a listed building, the concrete pool with its sculptural double-helix ramps stands empty, no longer deemed suitable for the needs of its famous occupants. Divorced from their original contexts, and great to look at, the Penguin Pool and the Penguin book are fetishised as ends in themselves.

Specialising in 20th century architecture and interiors, Cat completed an MA in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art in 2009. She lives in London, where she runs a market stall selling 20th century design, and works as a copyeditor and freelance writer.