June 2010
1 post
“For while it’s more or less inevitably true that aesthetically ambitious books...”
– The Un-Usable Past, Walter Benn Michaels, The Baffler. Rather mixed feelings on this article!
April 2010
1 post
Thinking about bringing this thing back.
If only to remind people that TODAY IS THE BIRTHDAY OF BOTH FREDRIC JAMESON AND SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
November 2009
3 posts
The Family Circus, by William Faulkner.
“Incest and miscegenation!” Pa yelled as he entered the room where Billy and Dolly sat. Billy fled through the doorway, too panicked for ratiocination, and wound a peregrinating dotted line around the yard and by P.J., the deaf and dumb youngest brother.
Famous Readers Narrate the Funny Pages, McSweeney’s. Link thanks to Comics Curmudgeon, of course.
Honestly, though, if you...
“He didn’t see a doctor, he says, until he was 17. His first dental visit...”
– Article on Edward Jones in the Post. Worth reading in full, although it’s a typical bio-feature in that it spends too long elaborating on his hermitage and not long enough talking about his fiction. In my opinion. But still good.
I think I got the link from The Millions. Thanks, guys!
Also,...
The Millions actually delivers for once. →
A needed answer to “Bolaño Inc.”
However, there’s one thing doesn’t exactly get said in this article, but occurred to me upon reading “Bolaño Inc.” Castellanos Moya and Edmond Caldwell and their ilk see an uncomfortable tension in the way Bolaño has been received in America: he’s been decontextualized — stripped of the literary and political content...
May 2009
10 posts
Unloved T.S. Eliot Poems.
I just discovered a set of Eliot poems online, written during his college years, that are apparently not collected in even the most exhaustive collections. This makes sense: they’re mostly pretty bad. It’s interesting, though, to read the little poem “Spleen” (probably the best of the lot) —
Sunday: this satisfied procession Of definite Sunday faces; Bonnets, silk...
After this no more middlebrowbookblogging I...
katiebakes:
So I just ordered Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded and The John McPhee Reader from Paperback Swap. (I know you were all on the edges of your seats.) (I still have two credits left! Send along suggestions!)
“What happened to libraries?” GM asked me earlier. Well, for one thing, homeless people hang out there. But also you can’t keep the books! And I have a perilous track record...
Twitter classics. →
It would be consistent with my character and attitude toward Twitter if I was annoyed by this, but I actually think the examples listed are funny and clever. But I don’t quite get it — are they all from a book? I went to jamesjoyce and all he says is something about a VW and “Go Phillies!” which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in Ulysses or Portrait or Dubliners. Maybe...
Daniel Alarcón, being tricky.
There’s an interesting upwelling of Polish lit in this pretty good interview from the New Yorker’s books blog:
Who are your influences?
The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern. I read a lot of Borges, for example, but I don’t necessarily see that reflected in my work, which is a little disappointing. It’s there, or I hope it is, just not operating at...
Like most things on Slate--
Reblogging yourself: the worst sin of all?
strub:
I’m not sure I buy this. But it’s still interesting:
More often, though, as in the Rosemary episode, we seem meant to accept Liz’s Jack-ward drift, if not cheer it on outright, as part of her maturation. Jack is a target of the show’s ridicule, but even as his worldview is satirized, it’s often presented as inevitable. Yes, he’s an unfeeling,...
Re: pre-reading
I went to a Denis Johnson reading the other day. He read prose and poetry. He introduced one of his poems by saying that he had found the book in a used bookstore in Austin, and somebody had annotated the poems in the book. He was so annoyed by the annotations that he bought the book. The pre-reader had in fact crossed out sections of the poem and wrote “dull” by other sections. Denis...
elizabeth gumport sets the record straight on... →
almostepistles:
eatingbooks:
(via leoncrawl)
I got bogged down in too much liquor and too much hearty male wantonness early on in “The Brown Coast.”
Liquor and wantonness are hardly male-specific. We need a new vocabulary for describing our reactions to text that do not rely upon outdated modes of gender. Also, I really love the book and Gumport’s review… so, bias admitted.
Hey, I loved...
elizabeth gumport sets the record straight on... →
(via leoncrawl)
I actually had trouble with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, for just the hyper-masculine pose critics have apparently been projecting onto him. “Leopard” didn’t seem that way when I read it, but I got bogged down in too much liquor and too much hearty male wantonness early on in “The Brown Coast.”
But maybe I should read past the first five...
Only now Mrs. Cheever lives there with a middle-aged woman she took in, whose 10 cats she seems to affect an annoyance with.
“I didn’t know she was going to have 10 cats,” she said. “Now I need her. The children don’t want to worry about me.”
Here. I really admire the writer and editors of this article for not cutting this irrelevant section, because every element of it is amazing and...
Interesting.
William not quite well —- we walked into Easedale —- were turned back in the open field by the sight of a cow. Every horned cow puts me in terror.
—Dorothy Wordsworth, 2 February 1802, Grasmere Journals.
April 2009
24 posts
The Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists in...
Collectively: they focus on the blunt, flawed, and fascinating senior class at an exclusive all-girl Manhattan prep school set in a haunted corner of North Dakota. They share a tangled history of subtly rendered racial discord and carefully observed changing fortunes, with a cumulative emotional wallop and loss of land. The stories are bound together by a fiercely honest, memorable, and polished...
What's up with the right-wing press?
I think it’s become common to point out that conservative publishers have lost their way. I grew up during the renaissance of the conservative press that began in the Clinton administration, and so I sort of expected books like Treason and the various Jerome Corsi horrors to stick around on the best-seller pages; but the renaissance ended sometime during the long slow death of the Bush...
A good way to end a review--
Chesa Boudin seems like a genial guy with a bright future stretching far ahead of him. If “Gringo” is any indication, that future should not include committing sentences to paper with the intention of distributing them widely.
Oh snap.
Notes in books: I like these.
I haven’t bought a new book in years, because I’m poor. As a result, all of my reading has been conditioned by past readers’ annotations and underlinings. These glosses are occasionally useful: someone helpfully provided a note at the start of the first volume of English Wycliffite Sermons (a thrilling read, by the way) indicating all of the places where the Wycliffite preachers...
"Not more communism but more public-spirited... →
The rejection of Animal Farm by T.S. Eliot on behalf of Faber & Faber. Thanks to here.
re: just posting about a panel discussion I went...
leoncrawl:
The question I wished someone had asked Michaels was: Why is literature that describes class structures and institutions (the way The Wire does) preferable to literature concerns itself with the inner lives of individuals and what it feels like to feel feelings? Why is that first kind of literature any less likely to congratulate its audience or confirm their biases than something like...
Writerly moments--
I just posted that long quote from “Visitation” because it struck me as a strange moment in a story I quite liked. At first I thought the problem was a kind of Chekhovian gun problem — the helicopter never comes back, never amounts to anything. But that’s actually kind of refreshing; the typical short story’s economy of symbolic elements dictates that anything...
Visitation.
“But don’t you need to be a better swimmer before you try to surf?” Loomis had a vague memory of the boy’s swimming lessons, which maybe hadn’t gone so well.
“No,” the boy said.
“I really think,” Loomis said, and then he stopped speaking, because the helicopter he’d been hearing, one of those large twin-engine birds that carry troops in and out of combat—a Chinook—had come abreast of them, a...
Watch
Strunk and White.
I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of “be” is to be condemned for being “passive.” No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of...
Why so hard on short stories?
An article by A.O. Scott from the Times, a little more than a week old: a weird thing that occasions two points from me.
1. I guess Wells Tower is the new hot thing. I really didn’t think that would be the case when I read “Leopard” a few months ago, nor was I aware of it when I started furiously tumbling about him today.
2. The notion of defending the short story is totally...
I'm onto you:
Two stories in the New Yorker about cancer and Shakespeare in the past month: “A Tiny Feast,” by Chris Adrian, and “Julia and Byron,” by Craig Raine. That’s tricky.
Beckett.
What £30 in 1936 represents in today’s terms, or the 19.75 francs that an alarmed young man had to pay for a meal at the restaurant Ste. Cécile on October 27, 1937, is not readily computed, but such expenditures had real significance to Beckett, even an emotional significance. In a volume with such lavish editorial aids as the new edition of his letters, it would be good to have more...
A conflicting opinion--
The story is in the second person because the kid is talking to himself. There is no good reason for this. He’s not having an out of body experience. He hasn’t had some grave trauma that causes him to distance himself from himself. He’s a kid. His parents are divorced. His stepfather isn’t even that big of a jerk. Second person is a gimmick.
In the interest of fairness, another read on...
"Leopard," Wells Tower.
A tiny hamburger is what the fungus resembles, cracked and brown and perfectly centered in the little fluted area between your septum and upper lip. Yesterday, in the cafeteria, Josh Mohorn pointed out the similarity before a table of your friends. A painful thing, considering how much you would like to be Josh Mohorn. He turned to you and said, “Hey, Yancy, do me a favor.”
“What’s up?” you...
Also. (Adam Haslett some more.)
What’s the deal with reading guides provided by publishers? I know book clubs are important distributional tools, but these things are bizarre. I just found one for You Are Not a Stranger Here. I mean, some of the questions are quite perceptive, but others are really too much:
5. In “Devotion,” Owen observes that reading Othello in school did not help him to deal with his own jealousy....
Adam Haslett.
I just finished reading You Are Not a Stranger Here, Adam Haslett’s first and as yet only story collection, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Book Award and the 2003 Pulitzer, according to Wikipedia and my boss, who is apparently good friends with him.
It’s a good collection. For my own idiosyncratic reasons, I liked the stories set in America better than those set in...
Emily Brontë's funeral.
Behind the coffin walked Mr. Brontë with Keeper, who at Mr. Brontë’s wish stayed at the head of the little procession and entered the family box-pew with them, where he remained through out the service. After them walked Charlotte and Anne, and behind them Tabby.
From Winifred Gerin, Emily Brontë — A Biography, p. 259. Keeper is the dog, Tabby the cat.