March 31, 2011
Poetry as a weapon of war in Afghanistan.
Blogger and guy who is famous for reasons I don't quite understand Perez Hilton is writing a children's book, apparently (his previous encounters with members of the under-18 crowd having gone so well). The Onion: "If he's half as good at entertaining children as he is at making the world terrible, we've got a bestseller on our hands."
Billy Joel abruptly canceled the publication of his already-written, already-edited memoir, which was to come out in June. So if you've been waiting for answers to some of the most burning Joel-related questions of our time -- Is it still rock 'n' roll to him? Is he still living there in Allentown? Does his generation continue to maintain their innocence on those fire-starting charges? -- you're just going to have to wait a little longer. (Bookslut trivia: When Jessa and I fight, which is all the time, we fight to the tune of "Uptown Girl.")
The latest in a long line of "being a Booker judge is really, really hard you guys" articles.
In this article in praise of small literary magazines, you get the story of why Night and Day, the recently re-launched mag originally edited by Graham Greene, was originally shut down:
Naughty Greene wrote the review that brought the law knocking on the door with charges of criminal libel underarm. Shirley Temple, the child star of a new film called Wee Willie Winkie, was alleged to be a figure of the "dubious coquetry" and "dimpled depravity". Serious charges indeed. MGM tried to sue, Chatto & Windus were forced to discontinue publication, and Greene was never to forgive the dastardly WH Smith, who refused to have the infamous issue on their stand.
Being accused of dubious coquetry is my new goal for the week.
The despair set in around book two. My editor at the Smart Set had suggested I write a column about books that teach you how to be a writer. I didn't realize I had been doing it so wrong all of these years! It turns out that I should write a shitty first draft and then spend all my time revising. (I do not work like that.) I should keep a notebook around at all times, to jot down any thoughts that occur to me, things I witness, or words I hear that I like. (Nor that.) I should fidget over every single word, choosing them for their melody and perfection, not their utility. And I should probably stop reading so much, because writers should write what they know. And most of these guides actually say that writers should not know too much.
The implication -- and they do actually say this -- is that this is how you become a real writer. If you do anything else -- say, the exact opposite of their rules -- well, you're not a real writer. Never mind the fact that for every rule listed, you can find a master writer who disproves it. I couldn't imagine for the life of me Graham Greene sitting down every morning for 15 minutes to write about how he was feeling, a tip that every single book I read for the column stole from The Artist's Way.
So fuck the people who try to tell you what a "real" writer is. And at the Smart Set, here is my column about Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason, writing guides, MFA programs, self-publishing, and the roaring noise of 275,000 books published every year in America alone. Consider it the flip side of the happy, optimistic piece I wrote for NPR about how books will never die.
March 30, 2011
The George Orwell Prize longlist has been announced. As usual, it's a hell of a mix - I bet that you could find at least one book here you'd merrily fling into a open fire, as well as two or three that you'd absolutely adore. And I know, I know, publicly admiring Orwell over the age of 25 is the literary equivalent of having Impressionist prints hanging on your wall while you air-dry your Che Guevara t-shirt, but the award site has posted some of his best essays and articles just to remind us that he did turn out a cracking good sentence from time to time. From Inside the Whale, on Henry Miller: For the moment you have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.
Under the cut, that pulse-quickening long list in full.
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley
Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher
Decline & Fall: Diaries 2005–2010 by Chris Mullin
Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic by Fintan O’Toole
Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography by John A. Hall
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the defiant people of the Caucasus by Oliver Bullough
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan by D. R. Thorpe
The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham
We Are a Muslim, Please by Zaiba Malik
Whatever It Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour by Steve Richards
Everyone knows there aren't enough roles for older women in Hollywood, which is why it's so refreshing to hear that Agatha Christie's 73-year-old sleuth Miss Marple will be played in an upcoming movie by 38-year-old Jennifer Garner.
"I'm going to publicly respond to this bad review of my book. What's the worst that could happen?" is the new "I'm going to have unprotected sex with every stranger at this meth orgy. What's the worst that could happen?" Just don't do it, kids.
NPR is running my review of Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature, a sort of history of all the ways literature has been challenged, banned, dismissed, bemoaned, and killed off -- and yet here it remains.
In fact, it's proof of literature's strength and lasting value that a 19th century writer like Jane Austen can still speak to the contemporary love lives of her readers, and that a book like the Diary of Anne Frank can still cause a ruckus among protective parents. That fight over comic books? The same arguments were made about Shakespeare, because, it was suggested, Elizabethan drama wasn't real literature. (Early debates also routinely happened over novels, ballads and books written by women.) People have been trying to ban books for ages, from the 18th century's Fanny Hill and the court cases against Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses, all the way to Harry Potter. "[Literature's] greatness... is enhanced rather than undercut" by these challenges, Garber argues. There will always be stubborn, scandalized readers trying to define what literature is, but the greats will endure. Shakespeare's plays started out as low class trash, and now they're considered the high point of the world's cultural output.
As usual, you can also read an excerpt from the book alongside the review.
Redmond O'Hanlon on switching from being a travel writer to a travel show television host:
"It's all done for you: no more privations, no more suffering, never being alone, no chance to get really depressed, a lot of drinking. Wonderful."
I was hoping this essay in the TLS about contemporary writers setting novels during WWI and WWII would delve more deeply into why it's such a popular choice. I think people were actually excited when Michael Chabon announced he was working on a TV show about "magicians and Hitler." My first thought was, give it a fucking rest.
Someone please write a piece on why writers keep setting books during WWII, despite the fact that there are no new angles to work there, seriously, let the ground lay fallow for a while. I have my guesses as to why (it's instant tension and emotional pull, it's easy because we've all seen the same specials on the History network, etc etc), but would like to be proved wrong.
Reading Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera, about the Juarez murders and the economic backdrop in the border towns, while rewatching season 2 of the Wire is not making me feel all warm and fuzzy about mankind. Mostly it makes me want to get a gun.
The Juarez murders of hundreds of women have been eclipsed by the newer, equal opportunity violence as drug cartels take over the city. David Rieff writes about the possibility of Mexico becoming a "failed state" in the midst of all this violence at the New Republic.
As a result of UK austerity measures:
Up to 523 libraries are due to close as part of cuts of 30-40% to councils' £1bn library budgets over the next four years.
March 29, 2011
Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has been convicted of "insulting Turkishness" by mentioning the number of people (over one million) murdered in the Armenian Genocide.
If you never got to see the 1990 film version of Captain America -- starring J. D. Salinger's son -- don't worry! It's being re-released. (Check out the trailer, at the end of the article. It is magical.)
Australian novelist Yang Hengjun is missing in China.
He moved to Sydney around 2003 and began writing spy novels, one of which, "Fatal Weakness," is about espionage and corruption involving China and the U.S. It has been published on the Internet in China. Mr. Yang also contributes frequently to about 10 blogs, including some that run on Chinese portals that receive millions of hits daily.
Prof. Feng said he was sure that Chinese authorities were holding Mr. Yang and expressed concern that they would try to charge Mr. Yang with espionage because he had a foreign passport.
Ginsberg, wearing white tennis sneakers on his somewhat pronated feet, entered Judge Hoffman’s courtroom late in the afternoon of December 11, 1969, and walked, slightly slouched but with a bouncing, cat-like gait, to the witness stand. From a sling over his left shoulder a large, woven purse swung at his hip. Facing the bench as he proceeded to the witness stand he paused, pressed his palms together, touched his fingertips to the bottom of his wiry, black beard, and made an elegant little Oriental bow in the direction of the defendants as well as toward the Judge who stared down at him from his high backed armchair. Ginsberg then took his seat and began to explain, under examination by Leonard Weinglass, one of the two defense lawyers, how he had traveled to India to study the religions of the East, whose mantras and other chants had been known to calm large assemblies of people.
From the archives of the New York Book Review, Jason Epstein's account of Allen Ginsberg's testimony at the Chicago Conspiracy trial, following the protests at the 1968 Republican convention.
Oh Simon Schama, is there nothing you write that you can't make sound filthy and delicious? Not even a book review? "For this is one of the most delectably artful pieces of literary malarkey to have come along in a good while; a flirty, dirty tease of a novel." "not so much like an angel as an imp: hot, jabbing and naughty." Guess not! The book he's talking about, and you will want to know after you finish reading his review, is Elena Shapiro's 13, Rue Thérèse.
Just in case you were wondering, the United States -- under George H.W. Bush -- freaked out when Eastern Europe had its revolution, too. Too fast! Power vacuum! We suddenly like those dictators, they weren't that bad! Etc. Reading Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire during the Middle East's tumult shows how similarly a totalitarian government can fall. If only the aftermath was just as bracingly familiar.
March 28, 2011
So every year, a dictionary announces it's adding a few new slang terms to their next edition, and every year, members of the weird subculture of linguistic purity whip themselves into a bizarre literary moral panic about what it means for our delicate little language. This year, it's the OED, which is adding words like OMG, LOL, and muffin top. Ian Crouch offers some much-needed perspective on the manufactured controversy, reminding us along the way that OMG was first used in 1917, so Jesus Christ, people, calm the fuck down.
"His mode on such nights is the circuit between bed and bathroom and lamplit magazines. But tonight he's heard his daughter downstairs ahead of him, and the delicate hiccups of the little breath-intakes that are her version of crying when it's crucial she not be heard. Her favored position is to wedge herself into the wingbacked chair with her knees by sitting Indian-style. He holds himself still, listening, then throws open the sash on their upper-story bedroom window and climbs out on the roof. And his wife stirs and, sleeping, is sad for his unsettlement. The grit stings his knees. Gravity wants to welcome him forward in a rush. The breeze cools his butt. In the moonlight he's just a naked guy, most of his weight on his hands, his hands bending the front edge of the aluminum gutter, the grass two stories below a blue meridian, zenith and nadir at once."
-Jim Shepard, "In Cretaceous Seas," in You Think That's Bad
Mario Vargas Llosa has been brewing brouhaha again in Argentina. After he denounced left-leaning president Cristina Fernández a few months ago, various members of the Argentine Book Fair committee -- where the Nobel Prize winner is to speak in April -- were planning to dump a bucket of cold water on the "neoliberal."
Before they could, however, Vargas Llosa said that he would go no matter what. (There was a counter-rumor too, based on comments posted on Facebook, until his wife explained he doesn't even use the internet.)
This week Vargas Llosa responded publicly in an op-ed:
The last thing that would have occurred to me is to go to the Book Fair to talk politics. It would not be proper, nor appropriate. I know that there is a time and place for everything.
If you think about it, that's a really "neoliberal" answer.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Colombian author of The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana, just won the Premio Alfaguara (worth about 175,000 dollars) for his book El ruido de las cosas al caer. The novel deals with the drug trade in the 1960s and '70s in Colombia. It's been described as a Hitchcock film written by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm sure we'll be seeing it in English soon.
Michael Silverblatt, KCRW book wiz, speaks with Carlos Fuentes, who he calls "the greatest living Mexican writer." Fuentes should have returned the compliment and called Silverblatt the radio host with the most -- deliberate pauses.
Found this article in El Pais about the difficulties translating Roberto Bolaño into other languages. The German translator complains that there aren't that many specific words for sexual acts as the texts require. The journalist ends the article sort of wondering why an obscure and difficult author like Bolaño is so popular in the United States, where only 3% of all literature published is from other languages. One word: el emarketing.
Vivian Gornick has a wonderful essay about postwar literature and David Grossman's latest novel, To the End of the Land.
This is the body of imaginative writing we call postwar literature. When the affect of World War II wore off in Western Europe, the region’s postwar writing slowly dissolved out, too. In Eastern Europe, where people continued to live under police-state socialism, it was as though the war had never ended. Decade after decade, Russian, Polish, Czechoslovakian writers produced novels, stories, poetry that echoed postwar writing in that it gave us the surrealism of permanent catastrophe. Writers felt compelled to dramatize the grotesque sense of emotional displacement to which whole populations adjusted every day that they got out of bed in Moscow or Warsaw or Prague. As one generation of writers aged, and the strength of feeling that had fed its work weakened, the next rose up to continue testifying.
Israel, too, is a country whose literature seems permanently postwar. That is, generation after generation of Israeli writers emerge to tell the tale of what it means to be living under the black cloud of a lifetime of war—everyone’s lifetime—where the dread of imminent disaster forms and deforms the national sensibility every hour on the newscast. If the guns aren’t actually firing or the shells exploding when the writer is at the desk, they soon will be; if the people one loves are alive today, tomorrow they won’t be; if the torment of the regulation nightmare eases up—allowing for a night or two of unbroken sleep—it is sure to return full force in a week or a month.
Michelle Goldberg has a lively defense of The Feminine Mystique at The New Republic. It's a book that changed a lot of lives, but no one quite likes. (It's weirdly homophobic, not exactly feminist, badly written, etc.) Even Stephanie Coontz, who recently wrote an entire book about the impact of Friedan's manifesto -- A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s -- admits she doesn't really care for the book. "'I began to find much of it boring and dated,' adding that her 'initial reaction became more negative' the more she learned about Friedan’s history." But Goldberg argues that despite the book's faults, Friedan has been underestimated as a thinker, and with the appeal of Mad Men and the odd state of feminism today, it's time to take another look.
The Guardian has a lovely obit for Diana Wynne Jones, author of Howl's Moving Castle who died this weekend at the age of 76.
March 25, 2011
Kathryn Schulz is dismayed that the super smart -- oh, sorry, "genius," as certified by the MacArthur Foundation -- Tina Rosenberg, who has written previously about shifting dynamics in Latin America (Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America) and Eastern Europe (The Haunted Land), has joined the Malcolm Gladwell-led group of Big Idea writers. Her latest book, Join the Club, even has a Gladwell-y subtitle, "How Peer Pressure Can Change the World." I mean, just look at East Germany! Writing such a book is probably way more profitable than writing a nuanced take on the post-communist culture of countries Americans don't really care about anymore, but it means this super smart writer is going to have to take on a painfully tunnel-visioned world view. Schulz's take on the phenomenon is very good.
Happy Birthday, Flannery O'Connor!
I just never think, that is never think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
The Economist has a good piece on the downfall of Borders. I'm a little sad about their closing -- which I'm sure is an inappropriate response, viva la independents etc. But as a Kansas native, with almost zero independent bookstores in the time I was there, I have a deep soft spot for Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon. When they appeared on the scene when I was in my teens, they were like beacons of hope and truth and light and justice -- and the 2 1/2 hour drive to the closest B&N was more pilgrimage than shopping experience. From the Economist:
We can spare a little thought for Borders. It has a particular relevance for American small towns and suburbs that isn't apparent in urban centres. In the latter, the chain bookstores are the impersonal monoliths that destroyed small independents by undercutting them on prices. But elsewhere, the arrival of a Borders would mean that a town was finally getting a bookstore, rather than a rack of paperbacks and Sudoku books at the supermarket. (Similarly, while Starbucks might have hurt local coffeeshops in, for example, New York, in rural America it has achieved its stated goal of creating a "third space".)
Regarding yesterday's story about the estate of James Joyce, it's always interesting to revisit other horror stories.
Carol Shloss and her publisher for her biography of Joyce's daughter, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, had been bullied into removing documentation and chunks of her book by Stephen Joyce and the estate, until Shloss finally sued to be able to restore these lost parts and won. This write-up of the lawsuit details the kind of tactics Joyce was using, and his decision simply to disallow any public performances of his grandfather's material, no matter how small the venue.
This confrontational attitude perhaps started with the publication of Nora Barnacle, Brenda Maddox's biography of James Joyce's wife. Maddox's publisher explains how the situation steadily grew more tense with the estate, culminating with a section of the book having to be razored out of existence. (via) The section the estate objected to was similar to Shloss's book -- it was an epilogue about Lucia's mental illness.
Then of course there's the definitive account in the New Yorker about Stephen Joyce's prickly nature towards scholars. He's rather routed in that article, and the Kenyon Review had a plea for civility and understanding in response:
Consider for a moment his family history: his grandfather’s famous drinking habit, his mentally ill aunt, and the release of Joyce avus‘s erotic letters to Nora (the New Yorker does quote the author’s plea to “be careful to keep my letters secret”). Even if there are no more skeletons in the closet–and probably there are–that alone would be enough to warrant Stephen Joyce declaring “the Joyces’ private life [is] ‘no one’s fucking business.’” I certainly wouldn’t want my family’s dirty laundry hanging out to dry, especially in the service of scholarship. And while, as the New Yorker snidely and parenthetically points out, that “claim, it can be argued, clashes with his notion that [James] Joyce’s work is essentially autobiographical,” is scholarship really the point of any great work?
And just to keep track: Ulysses enters the public domain in 2030, for those who want to have a spectacular Bloomsday celebration without fear of a lawsuit. But the archive? Not until 2073.
Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik is now being released in the States. There's a great interview with him at Der Spiegel, from the book's initial release in 2007, about the state of Russian politics, being a satirist, and why a novel about Putin would be incredibly dull. (via)
The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude -- you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.
Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik is now being released in the States. There's a great interview with him at Der Spiegel, from the book's initial release in 2007, about the state of Russian politics, being a satirist, and why a novel about Putin would be incredibly dull. (via)
The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude -- you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.
March 24, 2011
One of Wordsworth's homes has finally caught fire, centuries after the poet complained about its smokey chimneys. (Actual cause of fire: bad wiring.)
Michael Robbins and Elsbeth Pancrazi talk about poetry and the Internet: There’s got to be something wrong with poetic discourse when someone says something about a very well-respected, very successful poet that is anything except adulatory, and we’re still talking about it six months later. If this was a music review, if someone slammed Radiohead, it wouldn’t have risen to this level. People would have been very bilious about it, but it’s not something that people would still be devoting time to six months later.
Noah Cicero interviews Steve Roggenbuck (whose Internet Poetry we linked to a few weeks back) about poetry in the age of autocomplete: my concern is less about what is actually called a "poem" and more about what is understood to be legitimate ways to share writing. anything written in a bathroom stall will probably have just as many readers as an average literary journal, maybe more if it’s a high-traffic bathroom. bathroom stall writing also has less in the way of gatekeepers, which i like, although it might also have downsides like making a janitor’s job worse.
At Lemon Hound, Jeff Thompson explains his shift toward a poetics of data: If instead the creation of images is increasingly from language – and that language can take the form of a sitcom script or a WikiLeaks spreadsheet or a raw text file of numbers – countless new languages and texts, and as a result images, become available.
If you weren't already convinced that Gaddafi is history's greatest monster, consider that he seems to have plagiarized a Palestinian poet in a recent address. In a speech he gave Tuesday to a group of his supporters at Tripoli Bab al-Azizia, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi recited lines from a poem by Palestinian poet Haroun Hashem Rashid as his own.
Kiki Petrosino re-reads Berryman's 1969 National Book Award winner, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: This is a long, ravenous experiment in craft, a project that demands that the poet make himself utterly vulnerable to the reader. The Dream Songs are intensely personal poems, idiosyncratic in content and structure, and so intimate in their diction that even when you’re infuriated with Henry, you still want to weep for him.
Fernando Perez, a reserve outfielder for the Cubs, is also a published poet, with work in The Southern Review and Poetry: "I was trained as a poet and I write a lot of poetry still, but since playing baseball I've started to write personal essays more," Perez said. "I've also experimented with fiction. So there's lot of different stuff I write that makes it out occasionally."
Finally, via HTMLGIANT, J. Robert Lennon's Poem Idea Generator.
Chris Hosea interviews Travis Nichols, friend of Bookslut, poet (See Me Improving), and novelist (Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder).
I think that you can learn from anything out in the world. But the only pedagogical approach is to try and forget what you know, in a certain way. The way the poems work, there’ll be a line or a phrase that will come to me one way or another. The poem has to figure out a way to encapsulate and house that phrase, that line. ... There is a superstructure to the book. But the superstructure is my life.
There are only three things I needed to know about this forthcoming book Zone One to become very excited very quickly: (1) It is written by Colson Whitehead; (2) It is about zombies; and (3) Whitehead describes it this way: "If Zone One were three songs that came out between 1977-1992, it would be Wire’s 'Reuters,' Leonard Cohen’s 'The Future' and Joy Division’s 'Decades.'"
At Full Stop, Rachel Luban reviews Alexander Theroux's new The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, and finds it lacking on more than one front, including one familiar-sounding one:
Unfortunately, the laziness that characterizes so much of the book extends to its sourcing as well. Midway through the book, Theroux lifts some lines from Sallie Bingham, a writer he quotes on Gorey’s friend V.R. “Bunny” Lang. ...
Entire sentences in Theroux’s description are in fact Bingham’s uncredited work. This is an egregious error, but, like his previous failure to credit six passages from Guy Marchie’s Song of the Sky in his 1994 book of essays, The Primary Colors, this does appear to be an oversight. Asked for comment by Full Stop, Mr. Theroux responded via email: “I can tell you that the short offending paragraph above the direct quote taken from Sallie Bingam was an accidental error in transposition.” But that’s just the trouble: too much here feels accidental.
Deborah E. Lipstadt is on the Vox Tablet podcast, discussing her new book The Eichmann Trial, being sued for libel by a Holocaust denier, and, most interestingly, the case that existed against trying Eichmann for war crimes.
J. Craig Venter and his fellow scientists managed to replace the genetic code of a bacterium with a synthetic code they made on a computer. Which is how they got sued by the estate of James Joyce.
In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.
March 23, 2011
One year ago today, my brother Randy Schaub, a Bookslut contributor, died at 37. And for one year, I've been trying to figure out how to remember him, how to do anything worthy of who he was.
I'm not sure I'll ever figure that out. So for now, I'll just urge every one of you to become an organ donor (here's information for the UK, Canada, India, and Australia), and to give books that you love to the people that you love while you still can.
These are ten books that my brother loved, ten books that either he gave to me over the years, or otherwise urged me to read. Some of them I've read; most of them I haven't been able to bring myself to open yet. I don't know what, taken together, they say about him, or about me -- maybe nothing; it's hard in this line of work not to want to see narrative in everything. One day I might figure it out; it just won't be today.
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien
Cigarettes by Harry Mathews
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories by Ivan Bunin
Memories of My Father Watching TV by Curtis White
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H. P. Lovecraft
The House of Breath by William Goyen
Labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges
I've been reading mostly -- OK, exclusively -- about loss and pain and disaster over the past few months, and I feel like it all culminated in Jim Shepard's beautiful new short story collection, You Think That's Bad, which I reviewed for NPR.
Jim Shepard's beautiful, essential stories ... prove that he's one of the most perceptive, intelligent and fearless writers of fiction in America today. What we learn from pain isn't up to us, after all, but what we learn from Shepard is this: pain is pain, there are no small tragedies, and all disasters are unnatural.
Munther Fahmi is a well-known figure in Jerusalem's diplomatic community and among the city's foreign press corps. A visit to his small bookstore at the American Colony Hotel is a must for anyone seeking to immerse himself in the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among his many and well-known patrons are ambassadors, authors and politicians, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
But it appears all the connections in the world are no match for Israel's Interior Ministry, which is now seeking to have Fahmi deported.
Adam Mars-Jones hits hard with the first sentence of his review of Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels:
The Nobel prize-winner's book of reflections on art and life is the high-culture equivalent of the celebrity fragrance (such as Katy Perry's Purr).
Yikes. It gets darker from there. I haven't had a good hate read in a while, I've been liking everything I read lately. So it's nice to get ragey vicariously with a nice tart review every once and a while.
Brian Greene's new book is about the multiverse and infinity, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. There's a very good interview with him at Columbia, explaining all of this to the layperson. But perhaps the best part is when he's asked why any of this matters, when it's completely impossible to prove:
What if I were to ask you, What is the concrete application of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Or the Mona Lisa? Or the works of James Joyce? It’s a little hard to find concrete applications. But do they enrich life, are they part of what makes us excited to get up in the morning? Yes.
The BBC is producing a version of Wuthering Heights meant to shock as much as the original did upon its release... by adding swear words. (via)
"That's what I wanted to elbow out, this idea that it's the cosy greatest love story ever told," he told the Radio Times. "It's not."
Honey, you could add Catherine pissing on a crucifix and you wouldn't be able to shock modern audiences, unless it's broadcast at a Teaparty convention. Just keep in the part about the puppy -- that should be enough to show the torment.
March 22, 2011
Over at The Millions, Bookslut contributor Janet Potter -- oh, man, do we love Janet Potter -- discusses the latest from Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes. Janet is also reading a biography of every American president, a project which she chronicles on the blog At Times Dull. Every president! From George Washington to Michele Bachmann. (I've...I've said too much.)
When I first thought of writing my memoir, my sister said that the world needed the musings of a single 37-year-old woman who lives with her parents like it needed a nuclear holocaust. And she was right: words are explosive.
The US Department of Defense has taken a sudden interest in storytelling. Uh...yay?
The introduction to Rosemary Dinnage's wonderful (but occasionally troublesome) Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women has some very smart things to say about book criticism:
There is a curious aspect to frequent reviewing: it sometimes feels like writing a diary or a running commentary of evolving ideas. "You remember what I was saying last week about early psychoanalysis," you want to say. "Well this week I've been reading a novel that points in the same direction..." -- but last week's target was one journal, this week's another, with no particular likelihood that the same people read both...
But all the time one is learning while writing. A laboriously thought-out essay -- and I have always written with labor -- may change one's own current of thought...
Do I regret that the 80,000 words or so of literary journalism that I sifted through were not, instead, two or three solid books of academic research? On the whole, I think not. I have always wanted to write clearly and simply, even -- if it is appropriate -- amusingly. I detest academic jargon as a creeping disease, and have found over the years that by no means all of the impressive academic works that appear are hard-hitting and lasting. And I like variety -- to be hopping, in my own mind, from subject to subject and fitting them together. I have always enjoyed sewing patchworks.
Amen, sister.
I want to stay consistent, so here's Pascal Bruckner, in an excerpt from his book Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, which argues that people who are happy all the time are psychotic. Roughly. But the article is titled "Condemned to Joy: The Western cult of happiness is a mirthless enterprise."
Also: baby pandas going down a slide.
Today is accidentally optimism day. Maybe false optimism is more accurate, but hey, we'll take what we can get after this morning's headlines. Tim Flannery thinks we still might make it after all, and not destroy ourselves in fiery, watery, explosion-y deaths. The Guardian reviews his new book Here on Earth:
He introduces this book as a twin biography of Earth and our species, in which understanding the nature of each yields an optimistic outlook for both. For Flannery, a healthy planet is a "community of virtue", promoting productivity and interdependence, and humankind's imperative is to cultivate its share of planetary virtue.
This might be a book-long example of the New York Times piece mentioned earlier -- about tacked-on happy endings -- as his previous book was Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future, and we never did really get around to doing that. Perhaps Here on Earth is simply the warm blanket he's wrapping around himself as he mumbles "We'll all be okay, we'll all be okay..." (Skewing dark today! By the time I caught up on Japan, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, I was a little spent.)
We're all fucked, everything just keeps getting worse and worse, everything is cracking up at the most fundamental level... but really, it'll probably all work out okay. The New York Times notices that social and political theory books that spent the first 200 pages telling us how irredeemably awful everything is always end with a utopic, reassuring chapter saying humanity will prevail after all. They wonder why, but I'm guessing it's so that social theorists don't have to blow their brains out every time they finish a new book.
March 21, 2011
Esther Freud has a wonderful essay at the Guardian about getting lost in Germany at the age of 12.
But there was something else that I needed to say, and it took me a few days to pluck up courage: they had my name wrong. They thought I had the same surname as my stepfather, who'd organised the trip – and there was an uncomfortable silence when I told them what it was.
"Are you Jewish?" the father asked me quietly, and never having particularly thought I was before, I nodded, yes.
The Duchess of Devonshire, Debo Mitford, would like to talk to you about chickens.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic has won this year's Tiptree Award. I'm pleased, as I was on this year's committee.
From the press release:
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg impressed with its power and its grace. Tiptree juror Jessa Crispin explains that the beginning of the book “does not scream science fiction or fantasy. It starts quietly, with a meditation on the author’s aging mother, and the invisibility of the older woman…. But things shift wholly in the second act, with a surreal little tale of three old ladies, newly moneyed, who check into an Eastern European health spa. There’s another revolution in the third act, where what looks like a scholarly examination of the Russian fairy tale hag erupts into a rallying cry for mistreated and invisible women everywhere.”
Crispin notes that the fairy tale figure Baba Yaga is the witch, the hag, the inappropriate wild woman, the marginalized and the despised. She represents inappropriateness, wilderness, and confusion. “She’s appropriate material for Ugresic, who was forced into exile from Croatia for her political beliefs. The jurors feel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a splendid representation of this type of woman, so cut out of today’s culture.”
I fought hard for Jillian Weise's The Colony, too, but it's merely placed on the honors list. Now I have to decide if I want to go up to Wiscon this year...
March 18, 2011
My decision on what new book to read next is informed, to an almost embarrassing degree, by Largehearted Boy's indispensable Book Notes feature, where "authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book." And that's why Cara Hoffman's So Much Pretty has just skyrocketed up to the top of my to-be-read list (though it's also another one of those books, like A Visit from the Goon Squad, that everyone I know is recommending).
Anyway, Hoffman's playlist for her book includes Nick Cave, Palace, Cat Power, and The Clash, which is basically like 85% of what I was listening to from 1994 to...well, now. (All that's missing is my favorite band of all time, Uncle Tupelo, but Alan Heathcock, author of Volt -- read Volt -- included my favorite song of theirs, "Sauget Wind," on his Book Notes playlist.) You can find hundreds of other playlists in LHB's archive. It's more than worth checking out.
Longtime Bookslut contributor Barbara J. King has a wonderfully moving reflection on Lidia Yuknavitch's (absolutely stunning) new memoir, The Chronology of Water. (I'm going to predict that you'll be hearing a lot about this book in the coming months, and when it comes time for literary awards season next year.)
The marriages of poets rarely present an encouraging picture. Penelope Gilliatt once wrote one of her lacerating short stories about a poet’s wife in a Northumbrian cottage. She slowly sinks into despair at living with “his visions of moral order in biology and the superior integrity of sap, expressed in a thin precise style like the print of a hopping bird in snow”, until she finally reveals all in a television profile and they separate.
And yet the letters between Yeats and his wife, published in the book WB Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, are really kind of wonderful. The Financial Times profiles their lives together, their collaborations, and their partnership.
March 17, 2011
Verse Wisconsin collects and publishes poems from the epicenter of American union protests. Katie Vaughan notes that Poets have told the editors that being able to publish their work on the Verse Wisconsin website gives them a voice in an issue occupying so many people’s minds and that changes day to day. “There’s sometimes the perception that ‘political poetry’ is somehow lesser—that poets can’t write about events like these and do it artistically or quickly, but that’s certainly not true,” Vardaman says.
John Self reviews a new history of protest songs: 33 Revolutions Per Minute is a history of the ongoing rebellion against governments who take their citizens for granted, and of how the noise of resistance invariably filters up from the young and the sidelined, pop’s greatest constituents. (via 3am Magazine)
Bud Rodecker is adapting Carl Sandburg's Chicago into visual and typographic design: When reading the poem, I was struck by this image of Chicago that is not really a Chicago that exists anymore. That’s not the Chicago I have come to know, but there is a soul of Sandburg that still exists.
Reflections on generating poetry: When you develop a generator, it does not matter if even a single poem is output or read; you have created an infinite number of possible poems and audiences. When you generate poetry, you are sampling from that infinite space. When you interact with a generator you are a heuristic, guiding its path through state space.
Carol Rumens has a lovely reading of Ernest Dowson's "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae": His art is not all music and movement; there is a cleverly choreographed stillness as well. An exclamation mark after each address to Cynara creates a perfectly natural-seeming caesura. But it is an unusually forceful one, visual as well as aural.
Rebecca Melnyk and Leah Umansky tour New York's art/lecture scene in Two Poets: One Party. This week, an island of shipwrecked horses: His horses seem Biblical—holy—like the first horses on earth, perhaps even the first angels. It is as if they are trying to communicate with the camera’s lens, trying over the many years, perhaps since the first documented shipwreck of 1583, to adapt to our eyes.
"Help! My 12-year-old daughter wants to be a poet!": Although I understand your concern, don’t overreact to her news. Your daughter is at the age where she is discovering how she fits in the world of work. Expressing her thoughts to you is a healthy conversation; therefore, it is important you celebrate the talents she is recognizing and continue to encourage her process of self-discovery.
And finally, you had me at LEGO poetry.
Bethlehem Shoals on the poetry of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. And there you go! The most awesome names you will ever hear.
At NPR, I join the chorus of people singing the praises of Alan Heathcock's sad, beautiful, and unforgettable Volt. Please read this book.
The need for isolation — the urge to disappear — is a natural instinct after loss, a predictable reaction. "Even Christ needed time to hisself," says a preacher in "The Staying Freight," trying to reassure the farmer who lost his son. It's an echo of Gethsemane, where, according to Christian theology, Jesus prayed alone on the night before he was crucified. He knew what was coming, of course. The characters in Volt, just like the rest of us, do not.
Like Jessa, I'm a little bit leery (or perhaps I should say O'Leery? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I'm about to get fired) of posting things about Irish writers on St. Patrick's Day, but I can't not link to a story about Flann O'Brien. It's in my blood. My German-Italian (but Catholic!) blood.
Isaac Chotiner has a great piece in The New Republic about Stefan Collini's That's Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect.
I once listened to a large German baker in a café in downtown Frankfurt impugn American voters for voting George W. Bush into the White House. I nodded and occasionally interjected a thought or two while doing my best not to react defensively. Here was a Hessian who understood politics, and was simply outraged by the administration’s policies—policies that the American people had in some measure validated by reelecting the president. He had substantive reasons for his anger. But try commenting, as an American, on Indian or German politics in the same tones and with the same vehemence, and see the result.
Considering the number of times I have made things painfully awkward around Berlin dining room tables by defending America or pointing out German nonsense... Yeah, I should go home and pull this book out of the to-be-read pile.
I despair linking to St. Patrick's Day stories about Irish writers -- just like I despaired the Chicago parade, with its flowing rivers of bodily fluids -- but I like this piece about Bram Stoker's Irishness, and why a nation that celebrates its dead writers so extravagantly barely acknowledges Stoker's origins.
March 16, 2011
Two of the hottest: Simon Schama interviewing Helen Mirren, and really just reveling in each other's presence. The article is awesome, just read it.
The 2011 Orange Prize longlist has been announced. I'm rooting for Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge, which I loved, but I'm going to have to read Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which every human being I know is telling me to read.
Novelist Kazumi Saeki, who lives in Sendai, on the earthquake.
On my way to and from the shelter, I passed a gasoline station where people lined up, hoping for a small amount of rationed fuel. Reports of a catastrophe at the nuclear power plant in neighboring Fukushima Prefecture, involving hydrogen explosions and radiation leaks, have come in. Now an invisible pollution is beginning to spread. People have acquired a desire for technology that surpasses human comprehension. Yet the bill that has come due for that desire is all too dear.
Happy (belated) birthday to The Second Pass, one of my favorite literary websites. Everything there is worth reading, but I loved this recent interview with former Harper's book review editor Jennifer Szalai on the VIDA debate, and this excellent feature on underappreciated books by women.
This is absolutely brilliant: Linda Holmes, in praise of cultural omnivores.
Here's the thing: Nobody reads or goes to the ballet because it's the right thing to do. People who read literary fiction or listen to Brahms do it because they love it, and because they get something from it, and stressing that will always be a better way to evangelize about what they love than accusing So You Think You Can Dance of being inadequately dire. Similarly, people who like Modern Family like it because they get something from it, and not because they're from a unique population of those who "get it" (a term I would love to see banished for all eternity from cultural discussions of all kinds, since it's smug, vapid and hostile).
If you've ever felt like you had to apologize for choosing to watch reruns of Chopped over cracking open the new Dostoyevsky translation -- or vice versa -- you will love this essay. (OK, fine, that's not a hypothetical. It's just that I love it when Scott Conant loses his shit because someone puts red onions in a dish. Also, I kind of have a thing for Alexandra Guarnaschelli, and I apologize for nothing.)
March 15, 2011
9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.
David Orr skillfully deflates the Paris Review series of writers/artists/culturalists reporting a minute-by-minute report of all the culture they're consuming.
"We believe that a distinguished cultural institution like The New Yorker could be doing a lot more to reach out to black people," editor David Remnick told reporters at a launch party Monday. "This new version will feature the same brilliant essays, cartoons, and sharp, relevant critical reviews, but this time, for black people."
To paraphrase Woody Allen, I prefer to remain two with nature. But Jonathan Evison, author of the new West of Here (which, as a newly-minted Pacific Northwesterner, I'm looking forward to reading), has a great (though short) list of wilderness books over at NPR. Frank Norris's McTeague, which sounds like the title of a cop show but is not, sounds especially promising:
A bumbling dentist in turn-of-the-century San Francisco drinks steam beer, stuffs his mouth with a billiard ball, and marries his best friend's cousin.
Sold!
At The Millions, the opening sentence of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. On a related note, I'm ready to reveal the first sentence of the memoir I'm working on: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." I'm really proud of -- hold on, the phone's ringing. Who could be calling me from The McRaney Law Firm in Denver? Oh. Oh.
The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival "includes events for drinks enthusiasts," says The Times-Picayune. This promises to be more successful than last year's Williams Festival events for incest enthusiasts, which...I mean, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, you know?
The A.V. Club Chicago interviews Jennifer Egan about her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.
My hosts at Melville House are sabotaging my work ethic with delicious food, tasty wine, and rousing company. Damn them! To hell! Things will be getting back to normal on the blog and Twitter soon.
With the world in turmoil, the publishing industry in tatters, the question of "what is a book?" coming up more and more, one bright shining beacon of hope and purity arrives to pull us through: a self-published James Frey novel.
Just a taste of this soothing balm:
“His Messiah, Ben Jones, starts off as a lonely alcoholic bachelor living in a filthy apartment. He survives a horrific work accident, but strange things then happen that lead to him being recognized as the Messiah. Ben also smokes pot, has sex with a prostitute and makes out with men.”
Hallelujah, we are all saved.
March 14, 2011
Macleans profiles Xinran and her new book examining the reasons why Chinese mothers have put their daughters up for international adoption, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love. (Read Bookslut's interview with Xinran in our latest issue.)
Edmund de Waal's memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes was perhaps one of the finest books released last year, and I had the annoying surprised reaction of "Oh, he's not even a writer." Meaning: he is a potter and artist, with writing as just some sort of hobby on the side. And yet, the prose was elegant, and I was transfixed by the story of a Jewish family in early 20th century Paris and Vienna. While reading it I kept missing my stop on the subway, which is not something that happens to me.
Over at the Financial Times, de Waal writes about our assumption that people who work with their hands are somehow intellectual lightweights. (As in: my obnoxious surprise that his book was so good.)
All through school I read and I made pots. I read the great British potter Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book (1940) until my copy broke its spine, studying its diagram of the layout for a proper workshop until I could walk round my imagined future workplace. I read William Morris and John Ruskin. In 1980, I left school and went to Japan to visit venerable potters. Back home I became an apprentice and then took myself off to study English at university. Books and pots, head and hand. I was searching for the place where someone, anyone, writes about that epiphany where you see what you have made and it is different from what you had conceived. I was searching for a description of how an object can displace a bit of the world. I was avid. I wanted someone to write a description of Homo faber, the maker of things. I wanted a story of making told without the penumbra of romanticising how hard it is, without nostalgia.
The New Yorker reads Modernist Cuisine so that you don't have to... because frankly, you can't. It costs $625. But pretty, pretty.
March 11, 2011
Over at The Rumpus, author Roxane Gay has an amazing, and extremely important, essay about the language of sexual violence.
As Elizabeth Bishop's collected Prose is re-released, The New Republic digs up an essay on the original release and on poets writing prose by the divine Elizabeth Hardwick.
Nothing is more striking to me than the casual prose of poets, with its quick and dashing informality, its mastery of the sudden and offhand, the free and thrown away. "The wretched, fishing jealousies of Leontes." Fishing'? Yes. That is Coleridge. Corbiere's "mild waterfront sensuality"—the words are Laforgue's. Thinking about Mayakovsky's working-class dress, Pasternak saw it not as an affront to the respectable but as a warning to the "black velvet" of his own talent. Baudelaire: "What I've always thought the finest thing in the theatre, ever since childhood and even now, is the chandelier. . . ." Protesting the Russian Symbolists' use of images and sets of images as if they were so many handy kitchen utensils, Mandelstam cried out (or so it seems on the page) that an image was inappropriate for everyday use, "just as an icon lamp would be inappropriate for lighting a cigarette."
I was not named after someone, I was named after someone's wife.
Hadley Freeman was named after Ernest Hemingway's first wife, and her essay on coming to terms with that name is really quite wonderful. Hadley, wife number one, is the subject of Paula McLain's new biography The Paris Wife, and it goes about restoring the humanity to the woman Hemingway ignored in his writing and dumped with casual cruelty.
Alasdair Gray's Lanark is turning 30. It might be time for a re-read. The Scotsman talks to Gray and other Scottish writers about the book's legacy.
The thoughts of all of us at Bookslut are with the people of Japan.
March 10, 2011
Drunken Boat's issue on /Slant/Sex/, a collection of writing by women and transfolk about sex was so epic that it had to become two issues. The first, devoted to poetry, is up now. From Tamiko Beyer's introduction: Writings by women about sex are often separated by sexuality (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), and transfolks are frequently left out of the mix altogether. I wondered what would happen if we opened up a space for (cis and trans) women, transgender men, and genderqueer folks to bring writings that admitted the full spectrum of what it means to be a sexual being right now, right here.
Yet another reason to like the New Yorker: They read the O magazine poetry issue so we don't have to: According to Lisa Israel, an O publicist, “Oprah and Maria Shriver had a sleepover, and talked about random things, as girls do” and the conversation turned to poetry and the influence it’s had on their lives. No actual new poems in the issue.
Tao Lin finds "Poems I Like" for Autostraddle.
Using digital tools to build a new kind of poem, the stealthepic: Today a stealthepic can exist in digital form, and the reader can chose how many lines they encounter from the text. My plan would have the reader able to generate one-one hundred lines at a time or up to one hundred printed pages at a time. With a large enough pool of content the line generation would be able to sustain many rounds without duplicate lines. For a stealthepic to flow continuously, it can be powered by a spatial narrative or a narrative made up of nonlinear temporal sequences. Each line must exist simultaneously as a transition and a complete phrase. (Via HTMLGIANT)
In Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry, Rachel Hadas reflects on her husband's early-onset dementia, and the foreknowledge her poems seemed to have: Before 2004, Hadas didn't have a name for George's discomfiting behavior. But her subconscious knew something was wrong, she says — she had described it in a poem, "In Your Chair," at least two years before. In the poem, based on a dream, her husband sits silent in a chair, as she scurries around, "bringing the world to him," she tells NPR's Neal Conan.
Poetry: straight-up cash.
"If you liked it then you should have put a frame on it": Beyonce as conceptual poet. (via Vowel Movers)
There is no way this will not be cool. Two of my favorite writers, Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies) and Edwidge Danticat (Krik? Krak!) will have a live webcast conversation on March 21 as part of the new Algonquin Book Club. Mark your calendars; this promises to be incredibly awesome.
"I take up my old, old pen again," he wrote in his journal, "the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles."
Jay Parini has a wonderful piece on the afterlife of Henry James. For a man who left behind a lot of text (by Parini's count, 20 novels published in his lifetime, "10,000 letters and voluminous journals," "a five-volume set of his stories that amounts to 4,700 densely printed pages" and a couple not-quite-finished novels published posthumously), other people keep trying to tell his story for him. Novels based on his life, including two novels by Toibin and Lodge about the same episode -- his failure as a playwright. It's a lot of interest in a writer that most complain about being obtuse, over-written, emotionally constipated, and dull as fuck. But just reading Parini, I'm sitting here wishing I had packed Wings of the Dove.
The publisher of Anarchist Cookbook is facing jail time:
A businessman who published a "terrorists' handbook" that included information about how to make bombs has been found guilty of collecting and distributing material that could have led to attacks.
Sometimes topics stay with you after you write about them. Like, this piece on Eva Braun and the most recent biography written about her -- since then I click on any new information I can find online about Eva Braun. And then, this morning, jet lagged, a link that said "new pictures of Braun and Hitler fooling around" and yuck, but, I gotta see this. And whoa, THAT'S A GIANT PHOTO OF EVA BRAUN IN BLACKFACE. I think this maybe just cured me of my lingering interest.
March 9, 2011
Political columnist David Broder is dead at 81.
Paulette Safdieh talks to Barbara Browning about The Correspondence Artist, which our own Ben McLeod reviewed last month.
It's hard for me to express how much I admire Blake Butler, editor of HTML Giant, Bookslut contributor, and acclaimed author (Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year). So I'll just say that he's one of the few authors who's as personally kind and awesome as he is creative and talented, and he is all of those things to an insane degree. He's profiled at The New York Observer today -- I defy you to read this without going out and buying his books immediately.
March 8, 2011
Heading for the airport, with this and this and this in my bag. Yes, I was feeling a little schizophrenic while making my book packing decisions. I'll be checking in from New York City.
"I think what we are looking at is something like the beginnings of the David Foster Wallace industry," said Matt Bucher, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt textbook editor, an independent Wallace scholar and the administrator of Wallace-L, a 1,000-subscriber strong Wallace listserv. "I think it will be big, on par with James Joyce or Walt Whitman. Look at all the stuff there is out there about them. People gobble that stuff up. Look how many books there are on Kennedy."
David L. Ulin talks to Steve Earle, who is perhaps the coolest man in the universe, about his forthcoming debut novel, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. Earle's a great writer, which isn't surprising: his songs are actually some of the best American fiction around, and they have been for decades. (See: "Tom Ames' Prayer," "Johnny Come Lately," "John Walker's Blues," and pretty much any other song of his you could name.)
Kiala Kazebee has a rundown of last weekend's Emerald City ComicCon, and gives well-deserved love to my friend Erik Henriksen, who moderated The Guild panel. (Check out the video embedded in Kiala's post of Erik being all charming.)
Hey, fiction writers: Portland-based literary experiment Housefire is accepting submissions for their upcoming Thirty Days in April project. No stories about popular culture or Texas allowed. (As a San Antonio native who, um, sometimes reads Gawker, I have to admit that I am a story about popular culture and Texas. So don't submit me.)
H. P. Lovecraft's first day as a substitute teacher:
Greetings, students, and beware, for you are about to embark on a journey of eldritch erudition, mind-bending mathematics, and scholarship from beyond the pale. First, let me inform you that Mrs. Figgins will not be with us today. The maddening transformation of pallor and physique that culminated in her maternity leave hath subsumed her person wholly and completely.
Andrew Sullivan pulls out a Richard Wilbur poem for St. Teresa. An excerpt:
The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.
St. Teresa has been on my mind lately.
Over at the Smart Set, they made me read Knut Hamsun's Hunger, for a piece on writers' reputations and their political affiliations. Hunger is brutal, but amazing. I had never read Hamsun, because my first thought was "uh, he's the Nazi one, right?", which is why I wrote the piece. But the book itself, outside of the political discussion, is devastatingly good. The depictions of starvation, however, meant that I had to keep taking breaks to walk up to the bakery on Schönhauser Allee and buy Bavarian pretzels injected with salty butter. I should turn in my receipts to the Smart Set for those, see if I can get reimbursed. That shit adds up. Anyway, you can read the piece here.
Wonderfully prickly interview with chef Grant Achatz about his new memoir Life, on the Line.
Interviewer: Um, okay. So, do you like the cover?
GA: [Gives us a look and changes the subject.]
And speaking of food, New York let David Rees recap the premiere of America's Next Great Restaurant, and it's the fucking funniest thing you'll read all week.
Next up, an idea I like: POT BELLY, a restaurant whose menu consists exclusively of pot pies, including: A cheeseburger pot pie. May I suggest a motto for POT BELLY? Here it is: “Hello Jesus, I’m glad I believed in you all my life, because I am obviously now in heaven, because I am eating a pot pie made out of a cheeseburger.” Alas, our godless panel of judges can think only of the calories: How many calories are in this pot pie? My scientific answer: Who gives a shit? Shove a cheeseburger into a pot pie; let’s make some money! But no, POT BELLY is immediately REJECTED.
March 7, 2011
Welcome to March Madness, Bookslut-style! Our March Madness doesn't involve brackets, or Upper Midwestern private colleges you've never heard of. It involves psychiatrists, and crying. So...so much crying. But it also involves a new issue of Bookslut!
This month in Bookslut, we're proud to present essays by Elizabeth Bachner and Bonnie B. Lee, as well as the latest installment of The Nobel Reprise, in which Pauls Toutonghi discusses triathlons, a Seattle strip club, and the work of recent winner Herta Müller. We've also got interviews with Xinran, Rebecca Hunt, Deb Olin Unferth, Ken Kalfus, Patrick Somerville, Bruce Machart, Timothy Taylor, Maureen Thorson, Ben Myers, and Mike Sacks. Our team of columnist superheroes is back: Bookslut in Training, Comicbookslut, Cookbookslut, Scarlet Woman of Self-Help, Star-Crossed, The Bombshell, Unamerican, and White Chick with a Hindi Ph.D.
And reviews! We have reviews of the latest from Mira Bartók, Alan Heathcock, Elizabeth Bishop, Deb Olin Unferth, H. G. Adler, and more.
As always, thanks for reading! Jessa and I hope this new issue brings us closer to our goal of being the Anne Hathaway and James Franco of literary criticism. Now I'm going to go smile and make painfully intense eye contact with everyone I meet, while Jessa gets stoned.
Errol Morris remembers his grad school philosophy class:
I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.
Bookslut contributor Jennifer Howard updates us on the result of the case of the bad review that led to a libel suit: the judge threw the case out and fined the woman who brought the suit. The editors of nasty book reviewers the world over breathe a sigh of relief.
A full account, and text from the judgment, can be found on the defendant's blog.
March 4, 2011
Over at the Smart Set, I take a look at a handful of new books about the philosophers, from Rebecca Goldstein's wonderful Betraying Spinoza to James Miller's disappointing Examined Lives. It seems we are in the habit now of confusing the philosopher with the philosophy, looking to their lives when most of those bastards were miserable drunks, syphilitics, and perverts. While it does make for some lively reading, it's not going to help you figure out how to live. As I was researching for the piece, I came across a charming anecdote about St. Teresa of Avila, who was famous for her ecstatic writings about the passionate embrace of God -- written in the language of a torrid romance novel.
As it happens, though, she attracted devoted followers who just wanted to writhe on the ground and be ravished by the spirit. Followers do that sometimes. They hear what they want to hear and disregard anything inconvenient. So when Teresa the nun became head of a convent, it was occasionally filled with these young, flailing, “oh my sweet Jesus” sexually confused girls. One such girl was pissing off the older nuns, who knew this carrying on was not the sweet touch of God but merely an hysterical libido. After she relayed yet another night of passionate divine embrace, the abbess admonished the lay nun, “We don’t need you here for your raptures, but for washing the dishes.”
If the young nun was disappointed in this answer, it’s probably because she confused St. Teresa the Bernini sculpture for St. Teresa the slightly frumpy, disapproving nun. Philosophers did not always live out their philosophy. Certainly not every minute of every day.
@thebuddhasmiled lays out his rules for "being an Indian Writer in English of fiction."
4. Thy Female Characters Must Be Sexually Frustrated, Oppressed & Withered. Or Wild, Wanton & Uncontrolled. But Dead.
8. Thou Shalt Write About the Healing Powers of Spices. And Not Ignore The Sexual Tensions Inherent In Green Chillies.
Read them all here.
March 3, 2011
I wonder if there's a way to tie the name of this blog to the steampunk-inspired Chicago Poetry Brothel?: Held every six weeks amid the soft maroon sofas and silk tapestries of the Foundation Room at the House of Blues, the brothel features 10 Chicago poets reading original works. They call themselves poetry “whores” and perform under aliases such as August Rose, Pearl Du Mal and Durham Pure. Two are male.
This story about a mysterious "poetree" in the Scottish Poetry Library actively works a hitherto unnoticed border between cool and twee: None of the staff at the Crichton's Close library know who left the fragile paper tree on a table among their bookshelves. It was discovered by Julie Johnstone on Wednesday morning, sparking a flurry of intrigue and excitement among her colleagues.
At Lemon Hound, Julie Sheehan discusses form in her poetry, taking a "Sham Pantoum" as an example: Rather, the extreme rigidity of especially the pantoum fit with what I had to say about political discourse: that it is utterly conventional, a cut and paste job rather than an exchange or development of ideas, and that we are entrapped in this discourse, and that we routinely mistake "idea-words" for the ideas themselves.
Guest-blogging at The Arty Semite, Aaron Roller tries to justify the coherence of Jewish poetry: An awareness of Jewishness (whether manifested as pride, guilt or piety), a questioning of what it means to be Jewish, a feeling of interconnectedness with other Jews throughout both time and space and the willingness to employ (or inability to avoid) Jewish references (whether Biblical, liturgical or philosophical) all mark a Jewish poet.
A couple of weeks ago I linked to a piece about fact-checking poems at the New Yorker. Russian police take it to a completely different level: After the police interview Tuesday, he said he had been informed that a linguistic expert had reviewed his poem at the police's request and determined that it contained some "incorrect" references. A decision on whether to open a criminal case now rests in prosecutors' hands, he said.
C.S. Lewis's translation of the Aeneid, long thought lost, will be published soon: Lewis's gardener, Fred Paxford, who was instructed to burn the author's manuscripts, knew that Hopper had "the highest regard for anything in the master's hand". The gardener was instructed to burn a number of notebooks, but managed to convince Major Lewis to delay until Hopper could see them.
OK, Portland, we are a mere two days away from Bookslut's first reading of 2011! This Saturday at 7:30 pm, join Future Tense Books and Bookslut as we sponsor authors Mike Young (Look! Look! Feathers) and Jamie Iredell (The Book of Freaks) at Ampersand Vintage on 2916 NE Alberta St. (Read more about Mike, Jamie, and the event at The Portland Mercury.) Need more convincing? Read a review of Mike's book at The Rumpus, and watch the insanely weird/awesome trailer for Jamie's book, which will break your brain (in the best possible way). Also, free beer! We hope to see you there, Portland. I guarantee nobody will make a "put a bird on it and call it art" joke. (Note: not an actual guarantee, but if anybody does, you can hit them and I won't testify against you.)
At HTML Giant, Roxane Gay has a beautiful essay on Lidia Yuknavitch's breathtaking memoir The Chronology of Water, which comes out next month.
... I will just say I fucking loved this book and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to buy the book immediately and then keep it beneath your pillow or shove it down your pants or crack open your rib cage and hold the book next to your heart. It is really that beautiful and brilliant and any number of superlatives I will spare you from for the sake of decorum.
Elizabeth Wurtzel reminds us how good she can be, writes a Happy Birthday, Dick letter to Lou Reed.
I mean, I fucking love Brendan Behan, like any respectable American with Irish blood, but he once said -- and was recently quoted by Roger Ebert -- "A critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He sees it done but is unable to perform it himself." Which is a problem! Because he obviously doesn't know what a eunuch was, or the fact that they could still get it up and fuck, and often got laid pretty easily at the harems, because they were sterile. Look that shit up. But it's a very common mis-use and misunderstanding of the word.
Another word that people throw around without seeming to know what the hell it means: Luddite. It's now generally used to mean anyone who is confused by the latest trend. That is not it. Richard Conniff sets the record straight, and shows you how to properly use the word (so that next time you can be the insufferable snob correcting everyone at the party).
The great novelist Jennifer Egan profiles Lori Berenson on her life after her release from Peruvian prison. Berenson, an American, was arrested "for collaborating with a terrorist group," and I've been following interviews with her as they're these fascinating and frustrating combination of idealistic and self-delusional and naive and thoughtful*. She really thought she was on the side of good, of social change, with romantic notions of revolution. I can't get enough. Egan does a great job, trying to give space to all of these different aspects to Berenson.
(*That combo is what drew me into Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath, which I can't stop saying good things about. That self-delusional idealism, that innocent view of how the universe works... I've spent enough time in Lawrence, Portland, and Austin to see that you can get stuck in that worldview for your entire life. And that worldview is just as useless as bitter cynicism.)
The always charming illustration and book design website A Journey Around My Skull is now 50 Watts, and he's got supercreepy images and an essay about the unsettling Belgian writer Thomas Owen.
There's a thoughtful -- but totally contrarian -- review of Nicole Krauss's Great House at A Commonplace Blog. Nearly everyone else said the book is a masterful work of genius. DG Myers? Not so much. (I haven't read the book, but History of Love kind of did me in for Krauss's writing.)
The general dismalness suits Krauss’s purpose. Readers are more likely to pay attention to the intricate carving of a prose style if they are not encouraged to hurry on to the next part. And sure enough, at the Huffington Post, Jane Byrne claimed that Krauss “cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany. . . .” It would be more truthful, though, to say that Krauss cannot write a simple sentence. To borrow a phrase from the late Wilfrid Sheed, as recalled by his friend John Simon in a tribute published in the Weekly Standard, her prose is “fine sentence-by-sentence writing at the expense of form.”
March 2, 2011
Sorry, Glenn Beck, Julian Assange, Rick Sanchez, Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, and John Galliano, but you're not going to like this:
Pope Benedict, in a new book, has personally exonerated Jews of allegations they were responsible for Jesus Christ's death, repudiating the concept of collective guilt that has haunted Christian-Jewish relations for centuries.
Awesome! As a Catholic, I'm going to file this under "Things it might have been nice to hear a Pope say two thousand fucking years ago."
Australian author Hazel Rowley, author of the recently-released and well-received biography Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, has died at 59.
Member Of Book Group Just Loved This Book A Little Less Is All.
Kristin Ohlson goes to Albania, inspired by early 20th century writer M.E. Durham and her book High Albania.
I had come to Albania inspired by the writings of Edith Durham, a British artist who wandered there in the early 20th century and fell in love with the place. She returned over a 20-year period to explore, sketch, and write. High Albania was published in 1909 and detailed her eight-month journey from Shkodra to the remote and irrepressibly wild mountain villages to the north. Accompanied only by a guide from Shkodra named Marko Shantoya, she scaled cliffs, forded rivers, and rode horses to meet Albania’s mountain tribes. She slept on beds made of ferns in their homes, joined their riotous celebrations, fired their guns, and jotted down the lurid details of the blood feuds between families. She wrote admiringly of the hospitality of the mountain people, who were eager to take in guests and protect them with their lives. The blood feuds, the hospitality, and other practices were regulated by a code dating to the 1600s called the Kanuni of Leke Dukagjin, a clan chief whose actual identity is still unknown. When I first read the book, in a few totally absorbed nights on the downstairs couch, I was a young mother with children sleeping overhead. I wanted to be a woman like her, not only traveling alone but going to the wild places no one else had much interest in seeing.
Mary Beard has a wonderful piece on public speaking and what makes a great orator at the Guardian.
Mary Beard has a wonderful piece on public speaking and what makes a great orator at the Guardian.
Victor LaValle on readers who won't lend out their books. (As someone whose last book lent out -- Jamaica Inn -- has yet to come back, god fucking damn it, I might be on the side of the psycho lady who won't let anyone touch her books.)
It’s not the book, but the idea of the book. Some man or woman spent weeks or months or years or a lifetime bleeding on the page! Now you hold that essence in your hands! And other melodramatic nonsense. It all strikes me as a pretty Old Testament way of thinking. Treating a book like a pair of stone tablets. A series of commandments, inviolable, handed down by a deity. (Though, let’s clarify something folks, writers ain’t Yahweh.)
March 1, 2011
I second Jessa's birthday wishes to Robert Lowell, and add: Happy birthday, Richard Wilbur!
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
From "The Writer"
I don't know, I always imagined Poe as more of a Washington Wizards fan.
The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the openly gay Baptist preacher, theologian, and author (The Good Book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus), has died at 68.
He was the first black minister of Memorial Church and the first pastor of that church to participate in a US president's inauguration. The Rev. Gomes also was the only gay, black, Republican, Baptist preacher most people would ever meet. Descended from slaves, he nonetheless delighted in serving as trustee emeritus of the Pilgrim Society and celebrating his hometown's Mayflower history, a distinctly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition.
"The oddest thing about being an oddity," he told The New Yorker magazine for a November 1996 profile, "is that there are very few oddities like you."
Over at NPR (ahem), I review a beautiful new memoir: Townie by Andre Dubus III.
Dubus, tired of being victimized, commits to retaliation — and in the process, he gives himself over to an intense rage that will eventually threaten to ruin his life. He works out with weights, takes boxing lessons and, not long after, sends a bully to the hospital with a vicious punch to the face. It's his first real act of violence; it won't be his last. Townie follows Dubus through his childhood and young adulthood, as he tries to come to terms with his own inchoate but deepening anger, and desperately attempts to establish a relationship with his father, the legendary short-story writer Andre Dubus.
Happy birthday, Robert Lowell!
Forty years ago we were here
where we are now,
the same erotic May-wind blew
the trees from there to here—
the same tang of metal in the mouth,
the dirt-pierced wood of Cambridge.
- Finish reading "To Frank Parker"
"Will I ever reach you? I doubt it. The need for quiet - to neither see nor hear a thing - grows stronger every day. Sometimes I dream of a wall three meters high around my yard. With no humans."
Cache of letters by Gestapo-persecuted, Every Man Dies Alone author Hans Fallada discovered.
Over at PBS Need to Know, I chat with Cate Kennedy, author of the wonderful The World Beneath (my previous rave is here) about the way disappointment shapes our lives, the commodification of enlightenment, and why she chose to structure the novel around the Demeter/Persephone myth.
It’s a paradoxical thing but it does seem to me that the perceived disappointment we spend so much energy trying to avoid (the sense of falling short of our potential, of not being as special as we once hoped) is actually the thing that prevents us really living in the here and now of our lives. It’s easier to commit ourselves to a cherished delusion than to live with ourselves as ordinary, flawed, fallible adults. I’m really interested in characters who are “unreliable” in this way — full of self-sabotage and denial and no-go areas.
