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09 Feb ' 12:54
February 09, 2012
Two of my favorite music writers, Ann Powers and Daphne Carr (see Bookslut's interview with Carr), get together with Carl Wilson to discuss Simon Reynolds's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
As it turns out, we have Shirley Temple to thank for the existence of one of Graham Greene's best works, The Power and the Glory.
Simon Schama talks to Cindy Sherman... it doesn't really matter what I say after this, does it? You've probably already left the site to go read it -- or, you did if you have any sense in that pretty little head of yours.
(For those of you still here, unsatisfied and cranky, you can always go watch the Dead Ringers spoof of Simon Schama and David Starkie, holding a battle of the battle re-enactments.)
A children's story by James Joyce has been published for the first time ever by a small press in Ireland.
Joyce's The Cats of Copenhagen is a "younger twin sister" to his published children's story The Cat and the Devil, which told of how the devil built a bridge over a French river in one night, said Ithys Press. Publisher Anastasia Herbert called it a "little gem" which she said "reflects Joyce's lighter side, his sense of humour which can fairly be called odd or even somewhat absurdist".
Don't get too excited. The print run is 200, and the books cost up to 1,200.
February 08, 2012
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08 Feb ' 19:24
The inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year prize for the best worst review has been presented to a master of the demolition job, Adam Mars-Jones. He won for this little number on Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall.
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08 Feb ' 13:21
February 08, 2012
So it's not, but this video of Werner Herzog, discussing the stupidity of chickens, is better if you imagine it's in direct response to Alice Walker's book about her chickens, The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses, & Babe: A Memoir.
Apex Magazine has Maureen McHugh's story "Useless Things" up on their website. It's one of my favorites from her new collection After the Apocalypse. It includes useful apocalypse-navigating tips, like, you could probably still make money by making dildos. End of the world or not, there will always be a demand for those.
February 07, 2012
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07 Feb ' 12:56
February 07, 2012
As I'm trying to wade through all the Dickens material cluttering up the Internet today (including stories saying we are too stupid, or, our children are too stupid, to read Dickens anymore), this one seemed good enough to share: Simon Callow, in his lovely lovely voice, gives us a tour of Dickensian London
Christopher Priest pays tribute to John Christopher, author of the YA SF series The Tripods, who recently died at the age of 89. (via)
Over at Kirkus, I talk to Norman Davies about his new book Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations.
Your book opens with something of a rallying cry, for historians to stop focusing only on the conquerors of the past. What are the consequences of a historical record that leaves so many peoples and events in the margins?
The effect is most damaging for the mentality of the conquerors themselves; it creates the illusion that they are invincible and eternal, even though as Vanished Kingdoms demonstrates, all political power rises and falls.
One has also to link the vanity of the powerful with their lack of empathy for less fortunate nations. Wisdom often lies in the minds of those who, despite their best efforts, have known defeat and failure. People who think of themselves only as winners are heading for disillusionment and a rude awakening. Pride precedes the fall.
The question I didn't ask: why does he keep writing such amazing books that I can't put down... despite the fact that they weigh about 6 pounds and make traveling with them so painful. I am pretty sure I can blame a specific crick in my neck to the two week period I was reading Europe: A History.
We are giving so much love to dead writer guys and gals in our new issue: Sinclair Lewis and Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein ("American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem."), Stefan Zweig, William S. Burroughs, Robert Walser, Osa & Martin Johnson, Elaine de Kooning, MichelHouellebecq... Oh wait, they figured out he wasn't dead after all, right? One of those weird Twitter moments where everyone thinks Michel Houellebecq is dead and then it turns out he just decided to go to the beach instead of go to his scheduled book reading, right? So Houellebequian of him.
But there are also writers alive and lively that we show our affection for (or our displeasure, there is a little bit of that, too): Amelia Gray (there was a bit of a war to see who was going to get to review her book), William Gibson, John le Carré... but really, it's mostly the dead. You can make some connection between the dark of February to our morbid looks back, but that would probably be reading too much into it...
February 03, 2012
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04 Feb ' 00:12
Commentary Magazine on why there was such an outpouring of grief and memorializing after Christopher Hitchens's death:
Mayers piece and the other tributes demonstrated that mawkish self-flattery is unavoidable among journalists when they compete to advertise their intimacy with the famous. I wish I kept a list of everyone who modestly admitted they didnt know Hitch well but nonetheless recalled an encounter with him in which he recognized, with mystical discernment, their soul-deep connection. (I had passed the only test that mattered to him, wrote one editor )
February 02, 2012
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03 Feb ' 10:58
February 03, 2012
Yes: More opera writing like this, please. Sameer Rahim has started a column at the Telegraph called "The Opera Novice," following his learning process as he goes from having never seen an opera to becoming a little bit obsessed. (There is a disappointingly small amount of opera writing that isn't intimidating or too smartypants for its own good. It can be intimidating to someone who loves the music but doesn't know the language with which it's discussed.)
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02 Feb ' 22:36
February 02, 2012
I don't know if you heard, but DC Comics decided to hire some people to write a Watchmen prequel. Without Alan Moore, of course. The only real question is, what is the worst way in which this is horrible? Is it the blatant money grab? The obvious fuck you to one of the most talented writers they have ever published? Is it the sign that they have simply given up all hope of ever re-establishing their credibility? What measure of scale does it take to figure something like that out?
Austin Grossman is at the Wall Street Journal blog, and he makes a stab at declaring the greatest of the many evils:
The truly frightening thing is that DC has lost faith that there are new stories to tell about superheroes. As Alan Moore put it, I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago. I find it hard to argue otherwise.
Catherine Flynn on the years in Paris wherein Walter Benjamin and James Joyce overlapped
So for some goddamn reason we're totally doing an event tonight with Shalom Auslander and his book . It's in New York, at McNally Jackson. So, you know. Ready yourselves.
Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.
Described by the Nobel committee as the "Mozart of poetry" but with "something of the fury of Beethoven" and by an Italian newspaper as the "Greta Garbo of World Poetry" Szymborska died in her sleep from lung cancer, said her personal secretary Michal Rusinek.
You can read her Nobel lecture
February 01, 2012
A new Kind Reader column is up, regarding those moments when your life changes and suddenly you don't recognize it anymore. (I was tempted to plagiarize the advice my mentor has snappishly given to me before: "It's like you're drowning yourself in a bird bath. Stand up, it's just a bird bath." But that is advice you can only really give to someone you love. Otherwise it sounds like you're not acknowledging their reality.)
At any rate, I prescribe Metropole, a novel of dislocation and spiritual crisis. (As we all remember, William James said that the "essence of the spiritual crisis is this: 'Help! Help!'" A scene that replays in my head frequently is the one where the protagonist, having been dumped in a city where he cannot speak the language, does not know anyone, is terrified all of the time, spots someone reading a newspaper printed in his own native language. It's in the subway station, and he calls out to the man. The man also must be stranded in this strange city, as he immediately calls back in joy and relief. But he's already on the escalator going up, as our protagonist is going down. The crush of the crowd prevents either one of them from turning around. By the time the protagonist gets to the bottom, is able to fight his way to the up escalator and get to the top, the other man has disappeared.
I am pretty sure I cried when I read that the first time.
But at least the book ends happy(ish). At least, with a dose of optimism. Otherwise I would not have survived reading that book the first time.
Oh, and, B&N has asked me to make the next column relationship-y, as it will be printed on Valentine's Day. So send all relationship-y questions to my Kind Reader email. I'll find you a book that's romantic without making you want to vomit.
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01 Feb ' 06:11
The photography website Emphas.is is starting a new publishing venture, starting with Trading to Extinction, an investigation into the black market for endangered species. It's set up a bit like Kickstarter, which projects funded by special pre-sales -- a $100 donation gets you a copy of the book and an archival print. The New York Times blog Lens has a slideshow of images from Patrick Brown's book.
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31 Jan ' 11:03
January 31, 2012
I don't know about you, but the London Review of Books Kindle subscription has changed my life (a tiny, tiny bit). After realizing that spending $75 on an international subscription to the magazine was a pretty foolish thing to be doing (especially since so much of their fiction coverage is abyssmal), I didn't renew my subscription after a year. But now! It's on my Kindle. For a reasonable price. It is good to have you back, even if I miss my ritual of reading London Review of Books on a Sunday morning, the paper issues spread out on my daybed, eating crackers and drinking tea. It's not the same, but who cares when it's $40 cheaper?
(I know this sounds like an advertisement. I was just happy.)
From the handbags at ten paces department: Andrew Miller's sixth novel, Pure, has won the Costa Book of the Year Award after 'bitter dissent' between the judges.
Over at Kirkus, I have a short review of The Green Sofa by Natascha Würzbach. (Another lady! I cannot be stopped!) It's her memoir about her childhood spent between World War I and World War II. Her mother was a modern dancer who entertained German troops on the front line, and her father was an intellectual dissident who was forbidden from working, and who was hiding his Jewish heritage. I know, it sounds grim, but the book is a charmer.
Craig Ferguson tours Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
January 30, 2012
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30 Jan ' 10:03
January 30, 2012
As the conversation about male bias in book criticism continues, I noticed my own peculiar statistics. I've been interviewing writers once a week or so over at Kirkus, and of the last 18 Q&As or features, 17 were women. (I just turned in another piece today: woman author.) Here I am, singlehandedly trying to even out the statistics for Kirkus Reviews. It's not really a political act, just a product of my mostly female reading habits. (That sounds like I'm reading the back of tampon boxes, doesn't it?)
But it seems the bias at NPR is far, far worse, as the Boston Phoenix does a little adding up of their literary coverage.
Does any of this really matter? (As in, aren't there bigger problems in the world?) Part of it goes back to the VIDA statistics, as in, who is being paid to write cultural coverage for these publications? Mostly men. In her review of Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer, Jeanette Winterson reminds us of the result of any kind of homogeneity of voices in cultural criticism, whether that be gender or class or race or city or anything else for that matter.
George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millet writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesnt notice that Miller-women are semihuman sex objects. In fact, his long essay Inside the Whale barely mentions women at all. Millet does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.
On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini.
Ezra Pound! We were just talking about that asshole. Of course, now in our course Bad People Who Wrote Great Books or whatever I called that damn thing we've moved on to Koestler, but everyone loves a good Ezra Pound anecdote.
Also, if you're totally fucking bored and want to feel bad about the 20th century, you can read all of Pound's pro-fascist, anti-Semitic rants that he broadcast over the radio. They are gloriously all online for free.
In just a few days, I'll be heading up to New York for an event with Shalom Auslander at McNally Jackson on February 2. I'll be interviewing him live on stage about his new novel Hope: A Tragedy, at 7pm. I'm not familiar with this Auslander fellow, but I hear he's up to great things. Will try to at least flip through Hope before Thursday night...
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