Blogs

Four Good Things: Women Serve Notice

Body: 

1) One of the best things that's happened in publishing this year is NYRB Classics re-releasing Renata Adler's Speedboat and Pitch Dark. In these brilliant and innovative novels, Adler mixes deadpan wit with cringe-worthy rhetorical jabs and creates a prose style distinctively her own. Hers is a raw emotional fragility and hardened fortitude, reminding many of Elizabeth Hardwick and David Foster Wallace. We're so happy these novels are available once again. (For more on the Renata Adler "Renaissance," see the Guardian . . .)

2) A fantastic interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author most recently of Americanah): "I wish there was a bit more understanding of the many blacks, and the many sort of permutations of blackness. I would like every black immigrant who comes here to take a course in African American history. But speaking of stereotypes, the African stereotypes are very easily absorbed in the African American community as well. I remember how amusing I found it that African Americans were shocked that I can speak English. Because, you know, you came from Africa." (for more, see the Boston Review . . .)

"Ironic" Made Ironic

Body: 

I know, I know, making light of Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic," ironically titled given the lack of irony in its actual lyrics, has been done time and time again for nearly twenty years now. Ah, but sometimes it is done right. Case in point, Rachael Hurwitz's recent contribution, which is not only a funny send-up of Morissette's hit but a full-on English lesson. English majors around the globe thank you, Rachel! 

 

Three Good Things: New Books Galore

Body: 

 

1. "Two new books — “My Lunches With Orson” and “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” — unearth vintage conversations with the stars in their final years, when they were broke, in bad health, unable to get work and mourning their lost grandeur. But oh, what gorgeous wrecks they were, and what mesmerizing stories they told, these Sunset Boulevard Scheherazades." (Read more at the New York Times . . .)

2. Sam Lipsyte, author of (among other very fine things) The Fun Parts: "Some folks say if you have nothing to hide, you needn’t worry. But those people dream of wearing jackboots with their pressed jeans. I have plenty to hide. We all do, even if we think we don’t. We have no inside tip on which ideas and behaviours the future will persecute us for. Maybe it’s time to make a run for it." (Read more at the Financial Times . . .)

3. Few books have excited this blogger as much as Karl Ove Knausgaard's massive, six-volume memoir My Struggle (volumes one and two are available in English). His interviews are consistently a treat, too: "I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form. The temper, the voice, the style. All in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me—a cold hand on a warm forehead." (Read more at the Paris Review . . .)

 

Commemorating Roberto Bolaño

Body: 
 

Diesel, A Bookstore commemorates Roberto Bolaño, who died ten years ago, on July 15th, 2003.

Chilean-born author Roberto Bolaño has seen an explosion in popularity and acceptance ever since his untimely death in 2003. Though he considered himself first and foremost a poet, Bolaño is best known for his novels, particularly The Savage Detectives and 2666. Something of a literary misfit and enfant terrible in his early days, Bolaño was notorious for his disruption of poetry and literature readings and later for his scathing attacks on the Latin American literary establishment, particularly Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Bolaño represents one of the first major successful breaks from the juggernauts of the Latin American Boom generation, eschewing the magical realism of Garcia Marquez and the epic history of Fuentes and Vargas Llosa for something uniquely his own.

Three Good Things: New Store Edition

Body: 

1. Semicolons these days have somehow gained something of a bad reputation, with a good many going the way of Cormac McCarthy and rooting them out near and far. Not me! Count me in with the likes of Mary Ruefle; for there may be no punctuation truer to our speech.

Now here is something really interesting (to me), something you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million three thousand two hundred ninety-five words used by the Eskimo for snow. This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed–English among them–that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. Or, if you are blessed, they are heard by someone who knows and loves you and will be sorry to hear the sentence end.

When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: “That’s a lot of semicolons!” He is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being–an Italian as a matter of fact–that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.

You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart. Between the first and last lines there exists–a poem–and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.

-- from the opening lecture of Madness, Rack, and Honey

 

2. Have you ever been surfing online -- you know, those moments you're not checking Diesel's Chatter blog -- and find yourself wondering, "Oh, what good is the internet, really?!" Well, wonder no longer, my friends, and while you're at it get the popcorn ready. In his classic and famed short film, Tale of Tales, Yuri Norstei (of Hedgehog in the Fog fame) serves notice that animation is an artform of the highest order.  

The Taksim Square Book Club

Body: 

Al Jazeera's post this week about the Taksim Square Book Club is a stunning reminder that amidst the violent tumult -- whether it is a product of protest or life in general -- there is always also a certain screaming silence. In this case, these protesters having chosen to make their point by standing communally and reading quietly.

Posted below are a few of the images, but definitely click over to see the full slideshow. A meditative, moving scene.

 

 

Three Good Things

Body: 

1. We love this inspiring book trailer for Ivan Brunetti's new book, Aesthetics: A Memoir, and think you will too. 

 

2. Fancy a long summer read?  Not only are these books some of the finest works put into ink, their weighty mass affords ample shade and opportunity to tone arm muscles made flabby by novellas and poetry. Long live the 500 Pages of Summer!

3. "I sometimes wonder how the great writers of the past would handle the Twitter predicament. Would they ignore it or engage and go down the rabbit hole? Who are the really unlikely tweeters from literary history? Would Henry James, whose baroque sentences could never have been slimmed down into a hundred and forty characters, have disdained Twitter?" ("The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing," by Thomas Beller)

RIP, Michael Hastings

Body: 

 

Michael Hastings was a lion amidst the lambs of American journalism. Whether it was his reporting for Rolling Stone or his book The Operators, Hastings was -- to put it lightly -- provocative. To many, most of whom are shedding few tears this week over his death, he was a downright danger. Friend or foe, though, he demanded your attention. We think he will for some time to come as well.

 

Hastings' C-SPAN Q & A last year is one of the best introductions to his work.

Bloomsday!

Body: 

Happy Bloomsday!

Bloomsday, of course, is the day on which the events of Joyce’s most famous novel, Ulysses, take place, June 16th, 1904. To celebrate, here's Joyce himself reading an excerpt. (The recording is from 1924 and is a fairly rough, so feel free to follow along with the transcription below.)

 

Pages