In the magazine
February 2009
- An Interview with Jesse Ball
- An Interview with Brian Michael Bendis
- Re-Reading Richard Yates
- Dead Books, Dead Bodies: Reading Edmond Jabes and the Book of Dead Philosophers
- Biology of the Animal-Human Bond: Overdosing on Oxytocin
- An Interview with Benjamin Parzybok
February 19, 2009
Reason #5897 why you should not date poets: the topics of conversation.
As far as dating went, I operated under a tit-for-tat divulgence basis: you talk ball cancer, I'll explain my thirty-day long period.
Sasha Watson talks to Marc-Antoine Mathieu about his comic about the Louvre, The Museum Vaults at Arthur Magazine.
There is humor in this approach. In looking, not at the works of art but at “what’s in the wings, and what surrounds them: the frames, the guards, the archives… the flip side of the painting,” Mathieu finds a lot to laugh at. There are the guards who learn in class the exact tone of the “Tsssk,” that they use when a patron gets too close to a work of art and there are the restorers who accidentally add too large a “schnoz” to a broken classical statue.
But there is also a deeper reflection at the heart of Vaults, in which art itself is seen as infinite. “A work of art is a world,” says Mathieu. “The museum, a world of worlds, a morsel of the infinite.”
I had dinner at Alinea last night (watch my interview with chef Grant Achatz here), and I lost the will to live around course #15. In the best possible way, of course. If I slip into a coma in the middle of a blog post today, I'm sorry.
February 18, 2009
If there is an author you find so reprehensible that you have to choke back vomit when his new book arrives on your doorstep, is it best to write about it, or ignore it entirely because obviously the douchebag feeds off the anger he inspires? Maybe I'll have a cleansing ritual, bury the book in salted earth and burn some sage in my apartment.
I have been grumbling and hating and kicking Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace lately, while also being unable to leave it on the shelf. (I also had a very inarticulate conversation about her yesterday -- at least my half of it was very inarticulate -- because my frustration with her takes over.) This article by Patrick Giles, "Looking for Simone: Saint of Estrangement," about his visit to her grave, is surpisingly helping me let some of it go.
I knelt again, my mind clear of nerves and embarrassment, surprised by the flat grave--no tall marker, no flights of angels in stone--and the silence. A few flowers lay withering by the headstone, near a damp envelope containing a note written in ink sent running by the rain. Apparently many make this pilgrimage. But why was I there? I have returned to Weil's work at crucial junctures in my life. I've tried to understand her words, her work with students and workers, her rejection of the modish radicalisms of her time, and her search for answers, as perhaps the modern example of a spiritual conscience refusing to be seduced by the common solutions of her day, or frightened from answering its crises.
February 18, 2009
Camellia Nieh is interviewed about translating Osamu Tezuka’s manga for Vertical at Advanced Media Network.
I go back and forth on whether I like Daphne Merkin, but after this from Best Sex Writing 2009 I'm back to "like":
Penises, it appears, deserve to be worshiped or envied (or, if need be, encouraged) but they don’t deserve to be nattered on about. This is still sacred male territory and women trespass at their own literary peril. The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high gutter baby talk of D. H. Lawrence.
Murakami on his recent decision to go to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society:
"I asked myself -- is visiting Israel the proper thing to do? Will I be supporting one side...
"If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg."
In my head, I collect faux-blurbs for myself. On my nonexistent book there are blurbs like, "Jessa Crispin is a foxy babe" -- so said a particular feminist writer in conversation. Also, "Jessa Crispin has fantastic handwriting," said by a Hot Young Writer when I had to leave him a note when we missed each other at a scheduled interview. That last one I'm particularly fond of. I love writing things by hand, and I often copy out by hand passages from books and magazines when completely stressed out.
Which is why I'm sad about Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. No one writes anything by hand anymore, and people are less and less able to read cursive handwriting. Author Kitty Burns Florey was on NPR this weekend to discuss what in my mind is a tragedy.
February 17, 2009
First it was zombies. Now someone is adding Predator to Pride and Prejudice. Oh, where were you people ten years ago, when my book group was insisting Jane Austen is not the biggest bore ever and we must read her books over and over. I could have used a good alien invasion to keep me awake.
A thousand different designs for Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button, not a single one inspired.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science was here in Chicago over the weekend. (Also, I'm told, AWP.) Hoorah for that, because it meant I got to have brunch with Bookslut contributor, author of Evolving God, and friend Barbara J. King. She spoke on "Ape Emotion and the Evolution of Human Behavior."
(Okay, I knew about AWP. But not even an offer of a secret identity and personal tour by Daniel Nester could get me there.)
The novelist, whose book The Gulf Between Us is set in the Middle East, was initially welcomed to the event by the organisers.
But when they realised the novel featured a homosexual sheikh who had an English boyfriend and was set in the backdrop to the Iraq war, the book was withdrawn.
Are they very sure the book is not being rejected because of the horrible pun in the title?
Dick Cavett remembers the episode he had both John Cheever and John Updike as guests, and there's video from the episode as well.
Xu Lai, the writer behind Pro-State in Flames, was speaking at the One Way Street bookshop in Beijing on Saturday afternoon when he was attacked, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported. He had been speaking for a couple of hours and was answering questions when a fracas erupted.
His wife said that two men forced Xu Lai into the men’s toilet. She chased after them and found that one was holding a vegetable knife and the other a dagger. The men escaped, leaving Xu Lai on the ground with a cut to his stomach.
February 16, 2009
February 13, 2009
The Telegraph has the backstory for the first English translation of Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl.
I don't know what this video in French is saying -- something about how people leave flowers and gifts on Marguerite Duras's grave -- but I could watch that clip of Duras smoking over and over again.
Rachel Cooke interviews Iain Sinclair.
His publisher is marketing Hackney as "the book they tried to ban", a claim based on the fact that the local council does not want its author speaking in any of its libraries because he is "anti-Olympics". At this, Sinclair laughs gleefully. "So wonderful for me. So absurd and crazy, a metaphor for insanity, in fact, but the best piece of publicity. I was asked to go along to Stoke Newington library to speak to 20 people: old hippies and local history buffs, probably. But I'd written an anti-Olympics piece in the London Review of Books, and so the Hackney thought police decided: no, we can't have this person in our library. They lied about this all the way down the line, insisting it was nothing to do with the Olympics but that they can't have 'controversial' topics discussed in libraries. Eventually someone from the Hackney Citizen used the Freedom of Information Act to get the transcript [of what was said in a meeting] and, sure enough, it came directly from the Mayor, Jules Pipe, saying that this person is anti-Olympics, and he doesn't go into our libraries.
The London Review of Books piece, which is really very good, is available online.
(I forgot to say Happy Darwin Day yesterday. So, happy Friday the 13th instead, I suppose. Did you know Friday the 13th used to be celebrated by all day sex? Before it became a cursed, unlucky day? So truly, have a good Friday the 13th.)
Jesse Ball provides a soundtrack to his new book The Way Through Doors at Largehearted Boy's blog. Read Bookslut's interview with Ball here.
McGraw-Hill Cos., the owner of the Standard & Poor’s credit-rating service, won’t be publishing a book on the financial crisis that the author says addresses S&P;’s role in the markets’ plunge.
Barry Ritholtz, chief executive officer of equity-research firm FusionIQ, said he withdrew the manuscript from the New York publisher and plans to return his advance after the company tried to edit passages critical of S&P;. McGraw-Hill says it wasn’t initially able to verify some of the book’s claims.
February 12, 2009
The Telegraph has an excerpt from one of my favorite books of last year, Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine.
Why are we so fascinated with US literature? I have begun to wonder why I have quite so many books by American authors
Dude, I can't help you. I'm an American and even I don't have this problem.
NZ on Screen has posted a 1975 documentary about Janet Frame, and it includes extensive interviews with her.
Will a school's decision to ban a book reach the Supreme Court?
Schools are supposed to introduce children to a variety of ideas and viewpoints, but the Miami-Dade School Board decided a few years ago to put one viewpoint off limits. It banned the children’s book “A Visit to Cuba” from its school libraries because it said the book offers too positive a portrait of life under the Castro regime. That was bad enough, but then last week, a federal appeals court upheld the ban.
Twice in the past year I was minding my own business, and a man starts talking to me about Jared Diamond. See, he just realized Diamond is right -- it's not that the man's life is shitty because he's in the wrong job or his wife hates him because he's sitting in a bar talking to some strange woman instead of at home, helping with the children. No, it's that mankind never should have evolved into an agriculture-supported civilization. We are meant to be hunters and gatherers. Twice. Luckily, I found the solution to this problem (it probably works for a variety of other problems as well). Lean in and say very calmly, "I am very close to punching you in the face right now." Conversation over.
But this "agriculture was a mistake!" thing showed up in Timothy Clack's Ancestral Roots, too. Also weird, he had a section that could be boiled down to "Hooray for Housewives!" Luckily, I had some Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to contradict him in my new Smart Set column.
In her 2000 book Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy examined the maternal instinct, fathering, and the evolutionary explanation for babies’ ridiculous cuteness and fatness. (In short, “Look, I’m adorable and healthy! Do not throw me in the fire or leave me in the forest!”) In her new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, she starts with the question, Why are humans able to sit in the coach section of an airplane for hours and hours without fatalities? No other primates would be so polite and considerate, especially when someone rolls carry-on luggage across their toes. “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees? Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached… Even among the famously peaceful bonobos… veterinarians sometimes have to be called in following altercations to stitch back on a scrotum or penis,” Hrdy writes.
February 11, 2009
For some reason, NPR has a new review of Jonathan Coe's fantastic 1999 novel, House of Sleep.
Maud Newton found someone to translate an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.
Books are never enough. It can have echoes in revolts, in movements of public opinion, so it seems to be efficacious, but in itself The Second Sex didn’t change anything about the female condition. It only helped certain women to become aware of their condition.
Glen Duncan, in his press materials for A Day and a Night and a Day:
“For better or worse the world—my world, yours, right now in 2008, is loud. Guantánamo is loud, Abu Ghraib is loud, Iraq is loud, Islamism is loud, torture is loud. There may well be a time for another novel about a disintegrating marriage in suburbia, but it isn’t now.”
Sam Anderson reviews the loud novel at New York Magazine.
Collins, the confused stepchild of HarperCollins, grandson and last avatar of the venerable publisher William Collins, and relic of a more optimistic time in America — the year 2004 — died today at the age of 4. The causes were multiple: neglect, mixed messages, gluttony, and an epidemic of stagnation that has decimated American book publishing.
Tonight's reading series (7:30 PM, Hopleaf) with Idra Novey, Brandi Homan, and Hilda Raz is profiled at Chicago Centerstage, along with commentary by my lovely assistant Caroline. She's been running the series for a while now, and hosting them as well, which I am very grateful for. Everyone wave to Caroline, she works very hard.
A private bar will offer a selection of Belgium brews and wines to take the edge off, but reservation has never been much of a problem for the Bookslut crew.
Heh.
February 10, 2009
Lawrence Weschler is interviewed at the Rumpus.
I write books, but what really turns me on, what really captivates my thinking, is magazine culture. That’s a difficult thing, because magazine culture is in big trouble. If I write a book, it gets read by ten thousand people, if I write a magazine article it gets exposed to a hundred thousand people who are reading about something they didn’t know they had any interest in. The kind of writing I love comes at things from the side, and it relishes narrative itself. You find yourself reading, and about halfway along, you realize that what you’re reading is the most important thing in the world.
Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.
Maud Newton contributes to Granta's Fathers issue.
With the film adaptation of Bernard Schlink's The Reader nominated for an Oscar, and the Holocaust memoir hoaxes of late, it's worth re-reading this Cynthia Ozick essay, "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination" from 1999.
Gizmodo on the new Kindle: Eh.
(Also: A new competitor for Kindle.)
Will Sheff of the band Okkervil River reads Tatyana Tolstaya's story of the same name (it's one of my favorite short stories, too). The audio is at the Daytrotter website.
February 09, 2009
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Howard Cruse
A few years back I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby. I was immediately drawn in by Cruse's intricate narrative and visual mastery. As a pioneer in gay comics, Cruse edited the 1970s anthology Gay Comix before moving on to write Barefootz and Wendel, the latter having appeared in The Advocate in the 1980s. He wrapped up his work on Wendel when commissioned by a subsidiary of DC Comics to create his opus Stuck Rubber Baby, which received reviews from the likes of Booklist reading, "Maus, move over; as a great graphic novel, you've met your match."
I spoke to Cruse over the weekend, hoping to learn more about the history of underground gay comics (there's a dearth of information; perhaps something should be done about that). While you learn what I learned, you might want to check out his rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
When did you first start doing comics?
If you're talking about my first efforts as a kid with pencils and crayons, I can trace the impulse back to age six. My first comic strip to actually be published was a very Little Lulu-influenced series called Calvin that ran in our local weekly newspaper down in Alabama when I was thirteen. I was twenty-five when the first version of Barefootz began running in the University of Alabama Crimson-White and twenty-six when I launched my daily panel Tops & Button, which ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald for two years beginning in 1971. My first appearance in an underground comic book came in 1972, and six years after that marks the point when I was able to become a full-time professional cartoonist. So you see, there were all of these different benchmarks along the way, and I'm not sure which one of them your question would apply to.
He took with him, she wrote, "my real life, my only life, everything that is meant by my heart. I am in your keeping. And you are in mine."
Victoria Glendinning on her new book of love letters and diaries between Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Love's Civil War.
The New York Times profiles Yu Hua and the reaction in China to his new (in English, at least) novel Brothers.
Last year an anthology of criticism titled “Pulling Yu Hua’s Teeth” charged the author of “Brothers” with several crimes: selling out to the very forces of commercialism and vulgarity anatomized in his novel; promoting a negative image of China and Chinese writers to the West; sinking into “a world of filth, chaos, stench and blackness, without the slightest scrap of dignity”; being a carpetbagging peasant who gives himself literary airs.
The Independent on the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
"It is crucial to distinguish between the effect of the fatwa on writers and on the publishing industry. The fatwa... was aimed both at Rushdie and his publishers, and therefore resulted in the death or injury of Rushdie's translators in Japan, Italy, Turkey and Norway". For Cheyette, "It is the sentencing to death of Rushdie's publishers and distributors, rather than Rushdie himself, that has had a narrowing effect".
February 06, 2009
Kansas City Pitch presents forgotten novel Killinger! as part of their "Studies in Crap" series.
The cover promises: Lord, where to start?
With "He's ruggedly virile, he's karate-quick"?
With the fact that he likes his ladies not just topless but nippleless, too?
With the tiny frogman who services his metal manhood?
Rupert Thomson has an essay at the Guardian about reuniting with his half-brother after over 20 years. (Link from Maud.)
Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, causing a blind spot and the loss of stereo vision. In the blind spot he started to experience visual hallucinations, which he explains in an interview at Wired.
[F]or some reason there's often an odd, fanciful quality [to the hallucinations.] There's often an odd emphasis on headware. Sometimes they may have a box on their heads. Some times they may have a pigeon or a vulture on their heads. They're not usually threatening, and they're usually recognized as hallucinations, they're not mistaken for reality.
There was a fine poet called Virginia Adair. She published a lot as a young woman but then became a teacher of English. But then she lost her vision and started hallucinating in her 80s and this started up her poetic voice again. And she published her first book of poems when she was 83. So she was able to use her Charles Bonnet hallucinations very creatively.... Quite a lot of her poems are about the amazing cascade of images which would rush through her mind.
Charlotte Mandel, the translator of Proust's The Lemoine Affair and the upcoming The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, is interviewed at Maitresse.
Amy Reeves profiles Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House and publisher of Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill. Maybe he should have been in Outliers!
"I've always been lucky," Cerf (1898-1971) wrote in his memoir, "At Random."
His luck started with his birth into a rich New York family.
Indeed.
There is a satisfying takedown of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers in the New Republic, even if it gets unnecessarily angry at a few points. (Although, considering how many people read Gladwell and think he's brilliant, the anger might be justified.)
Gladwell's overarching thesis in Outliers is so obviously correct that it hardly merits discussion. "The people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are." Also, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of your life. Gladwell writes as if he is the only person in the world in possession of this platitudinous wisdom. The central irony of Outliers is that, Gladwell's discomfort with the self-help genre notwithstanding, he has written a book that conforms to it perfectly. This is a motivational manual. It is larded with inspirational stories, and with interactive games to capture the reader's attention--with handy charts and portentous graphs. Its language puts one in mind of, say, Tony Robbins. (On his blog Gladwell recently referred to two speaking engagements on his book tour as "shows.") We are in guru-land here.
Zach Baron interviews Michael Robbins about his New Yorker debut, "Alien vs. Predator". Sounds like they had fun: I'm a very slow poet. I might think of a couple of good lines and put them in a poem that I'm working on that takes me--I've been working on this poem right now which is loosely based on the video for Guns N Roses's "November Rain." And I've been working on it over a month, just writing things and deleting them and trying to think of a good way to rhyme with 'Axl.' It turns out 'Paxil' was staring me in the face the whole time and I didn't realize it.
Ben Myers waxes nostalgic for the days when poets were . . . farmers: There's a great distinction between these poets, who, because their survival depends on it, have a far more intimate relationship with the land, and those who describe it while looking at it from their firesides on the other side of the window.
Tim Martin discovers an important truth: The existence of Ubuweb, PennSound, and other archives means never again having to leave your blog post bereft of multimedia poetry links.
Portland, Maine, police sell fundraising calendar . . . of their poems: Poetry has given Poisson an emotional outlet while opening her eyes to the world around her. In "The Things I Carry," a poem on the January page, Poisson writes about her feelings as she equips herself for each shift with a .45-caliber Glock, a knife, pepper spray, handcuffs, a baton and two clips of bullets.
Gary Sullivan recounts the history of Flarf, proceeding from one proclamation of the end of irony to another: The Flarf e-mail listserv, launched by half-a-dozen poets in March of 2001, was a kind of joke, or anyway a space where people who liked to tell jokes—inside jokes, about the poetry world, mostly—could hang out and dish. And write awful poetry, often parodying the kind of earnest sludge we’d all had poured into our ears at our favorite venues while dutifully waiting for the poetry to happen.
Robert Archambeau unpacks Iggy's line about being "just a modern guy" in "Lust for Life: "Lust for Life" works as minor literature in the way it reworks the meaning of what it means to be "just a modern guy." It's worth lingering a bit over what the phrase "just a modern guy" means in the song. I think the "just" (as in "only" or "merely") is important, because it really does make "modern" seem less like it means "up to date" or "of our time" and more like it means "ordinary" or "regular" or "not unusual." I mean, it's a matter of nuance.
February 05, 2009
Also, any progress made yet on an accurate translation into English of The Second Sex? I mean, no rush or anything. It’s only 55 years old.
Brock Clarke revisits two Muriel Spark novels: The Comforters and Memento Mori.
In these two sly, spectacular novels, Spark shows us what should have been obvious all along: of course art is artificial, and of course writers must be self-conscious about it, but being self-conscious is not the end of a writer’s responsibility toward her book (as one often feels in, say, John Barth’s fiction, or Raymond Federman’s, or Ronald Sukenick’s), her characters, her readers, but is simply the most efficient, most honest, most rewarding, most self-critical, most moving, most beautiful way of doing so.