January 2010
51 posts
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Anti-Epiphanies: Thoughts On Katherine Mansfield's...
(both the stories I talk about here are online in full—links below—and both are very short)
Almost all Katherine Mansfield’s stories end abruptly: it seems an aesthetic instinct, like a built-in metronome. In her later stories—which in the collected edition I’m reading follow “Bliss”—she finesses these endings into remarkably complex anti-epiphanies, refusing us knowledge as much as...
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"I have not seen a better and perhaps more...
- Marc Ambinder
What would our political situation be like, what kind of leaders would we elect, if parliamentary-style debate was par for the course? Obama speaks to the House GOP retreat:
and takes questions:
CSPAN coverage (video) here.
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Zoned Out
Last night I inadvertently reenacted the old Soviet joke about going to the wrong apartment in the wrong building in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city because they all look exactly the same. Mine was a suburban version—though what does one even call the strip-mall sprawl outside small towns, where there’s little -urb to be sub- to? Anyhow, I missed my exit and had to turn around in the...
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Bliss, Absolute Bliss
First up in my independent study is Katherine Mansfield, whom you should totally Wiki, but only after reading “Bliss,” which is free here.
“Bliss” contains one of the first and best modern party scenes. To me it feels far more contemporary than it is (ninety-two years old), and it’s some of the most beautiful writing in English:
ALTHOUGH Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this...
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We Have Always Been At War With East Asia
Listening to Garry Wills talk with Terry Gross about his new book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, it occurred to me how quaint the words “mobilize” and “demobilize” have come to sound—dusty, steam-powered, telegraphed to generals on horseback from pre-autobahn Berlin and Paris before the first Coco cut the first little black dress. Quaint because here in the...
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I'm In The New Yorker...
…events listings:
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In Soviet Russia, Story Revise You
At a certain point when revising stories, I find they begin to work in ways it never occurred to me to attempt. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of this recognition that a story is coherent and complex and mysterious enough to breathe on its own and no longer needs—or has room for—my impetus or desires. It’s ready to send out—not done; nothing is ever done. But complete.
I’ve been revising three...
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"Healthcare Was Supposed To Be Done By August, Now... →
newsweek: Downfall, Scott Brown edition
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A Week From Tonight
I’ll be reading at KGB Bar in New York, and I’d love to see you there:
Wednesday, January 27, 7pm 85 E. 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Ave) FREE
Also reading:
Ben Nachumi (poetry) Christopher Sorrentino (fiction - National Book Award finalist)
Part of the Open City KGB reading series.
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst are...
This—via alexbalk, who notes “some flaws in the logic, but mostly yes”—is more worth reading than all the post-Scott Brown punditry put together (with the exception of TNR’s excellent Jonathan Chiat).
Come on, Dems. The GOP does not want to cuddle in your Snuggy, not even if you let them choose what to watch tonight.
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So the Massachusetts election reminds me of that point in Monopoly when, if you’ve been luckier than your opponents, you’ve gotten the first monopoly of the game, put some houses on your properties, and had your opponents land on your monopoly once or twice, and you compare your assets to theirs and you think alright. The game isn’t won yet, but you’re safe and you can sit back. Relax. Enjoy...
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“After some long years of a general feeling in the publishing world that...”
– Gina Frangello Part of a long, remarkably un-flame-war-y discussion in the comments to VQR editor Ted Genoways’s Mother Jones piece on the troubles of old-school literary journals. A smart discussion on the state of small presses and online vs. print literary journals is ably continued by...
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“Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more...”
– Joyce Carol Oates The Guardian’s awesomely-named Ian Sample writes about a Cambridge University study showing that “a few days of running led to the growth of hundreds of thousands of new brain cells that improved the ability to recall memories without confusing them.” The new...
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“[Cheever’s] was an Anglican New York, and its suburbs a hungover...”
– Elizabeth Hardwick
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Authors and Dogs →
Absurdly pleasing. Photographs by Jill Krementz from the 1970s to the present: Amy Hempel, Stephen King, John Cheever, Ann Patchett, Amy Tan, Kurt Vonnegut, others
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Another Haiti
The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson remembers the Haiti where his father worked in the fifties
before it was deforested for charcoal for poor people’s firewood… poor but not yet desperate. In those days, it was a green and verdant place, full of little family truck-farms, and the postwar West’s early aid and development specialists who were sent there spoke about the country as the...
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Headed Up The East Coast
I spent yesterday afternoon driving. The semester starts on Tuesday; emails are flying: classroom assignments, set up for class blogs (yay!); scheduling conflicts, deadlines (Deadlines?).
I love mid-winter light, especially with the sun at my back. For three hundred miles, there were no clouds or wind; a pink rim to the horizon; pale branches and brown earth through New Jersey and Rockland...
Recommended Haiti charities →
abbyjean:
Partners in Health has been creating medical infrastructure and providing medical care and social services in haiti since 1987… they already have a significant amount of equipment, staff, and infrastructure on the ground, and have already developed relationships with individuals and groups in Haiti.
Read more…
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Rachel Maddow's List of Charities Active In Haiti
Phone numbers, web addresses, and numbers for having $5 and $10 donations added to your cell phone bill. Also: FBI scam alerts. Full list here or after the jump.
Action Against Hunger, 877-777-1420
American Red Cross, 800-733-2767
American Jewish World Service, 212-792-2900
AmeriCares, 800-486-4357
Beyond Borders, 866-424-8403
CARE, 800-521-2273
CarmaFoundation
Catholic Relief...
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Perhaps You'd Like To Get Ordinary With That Mr....
My piece on Bell, Book and Candle and The Lady Eve is up over on Bright Wall In A Dark Room:
Snow is falling on a Greenwich Village sidewalk. Pedestrians—almost all of them couples, carrying Christmas trees and shopping bags—rush past the window of a tribal art gallery. Inside is Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak, looking as though she’s just gotten home from the set of Vertigo and slipped into...
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Book Looks, Lit Mags & Wish Lists
Karen Brown’s story in the current issue of Five Points is fantastic. Also: Birkenstock nuns! Ummm, band name…
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Adam Shatz: In Orhan Pamuk’s fiction “happiness is always a thing of the past.”
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Robert Scheer interviews Martin Jacques about Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The End of the...
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“Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place....”
– Alice Munro, in a 2001 interview in The Atlantic, on the publication of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
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via britticisms:
“Kamera Song” by The Inner...
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An Old Carioca
You can know people a long time, and then, spending some time with them, realize that what you’d been most fond of were actually projections of your own ideals, and that—shock!—these people are themselves, and of their time.
I’m talking about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. I’ve spent more time with him than her—several Easter parades now—and he’s always so fine in his top hat and tails, and yet...
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“Belinda” by Amity Gaige is one of last month’s stories at Fifty-two Stories:
Sometimes, until you laugh, you do not know how buttoned-down you’ve been all your life, how reverent, your sense of pleasure asleep like a leg. Around her in-laws, Karin felt veils lift. She felt oppressive laws of the spirit repealed. She felt consequences inconsequenced. In her in-laws’ presence, her...
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Viva La Vida (Coldplay cover) - Lady Gaga
Love...
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Wife In Reverse →
Stephen Dixon’s new story is a toe-curlingly brilliant tweak of perceptions and expectations of time, and of time in fiction. From the editor’s note:
This story was written while the author was also at work on his current novel, His Wife Leaves Him [yet to be published]. The story originated as a compressed, reverse version of the novel, though it didn’t turn out exactly that...
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Blinded By Delight? →
Apartment Therapy Media describes itself as “the ultimate online destination for all things home” with a a reach of over 3 million unique visitors per month. It was also recently hailed as the #1 Design Blog by The Times of London. Having seen Jesse Lu’s recent call-out of AT on Everyday Object and considering its regrettable campaign of championing Knitta, Please [ed: !?!?] in 2006, 2008...
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One For The Tumblr Wish-List
An option to specify a custom slug for the ‘notes’ next to your name/avatar when adding text to a reblog.
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Not The Ayatollah Of Rock And Rolla
Filmmaker and Iranian exile Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “The Secrets of Khamenei’s Life” has been translated from Farsi:
Khamenei usually listens to 20 minutes of recorded conversations against himself, between opponents or even officials, every night before sleeping[…]
[His wife] Khojasteh, who has sometimes listened to these recordings, has little patience for the...
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“Both insular and extroverted, the easy ability to repost from the blog of...”
– “Insp.” by Jackson Boxer for Dossier (via britticisms)
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Michael Pollan's Tweetable Guide To Better Health:
Don’t eat anything advertised on television.
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“when I was younger, I think plot felt artificial to me. Now that life has swung...”
– Elizabeth Stark, on Alex Chee’s excellent “Why Must The Novel Be Boring?”
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Steve Almond writes in The Rumpus re: that Katie Roiphe thing:
Might it be worth observing that, in the days of Updike and Roth, a certain brand of sexual candor still felt taboo, whereas today lesbian bondage and interracial blowjobs are pretty much a standard marketing tool for most Fortune 500 companies?
But you see, part of the reason Katie Roiphe can point to Eggers and Foster Wallace as...
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The Anthologist
Hello, Sarah here, and I’m going to try to tell you about Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. Not all about, because there are a lot of reviews already out there saying that you should read it, and they’re right. But about a few of the things I’ve remarked on while reading it that the reviews I’ve read haven’t remarked on. A nice homonym, ‘remark.’ You can make a remark or remark on...
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Does Katie Roiphe Touch Sensitive Areas?
How We’re Literary Now: In A Bubble. Responses to Roiphe’s Great (White, Straight) Male Novelist piece are all over Tumblr—thoughtful, sharp, glib, funny, annoyed, appreciative, concise responses. Go to NYTimes.com, however, and Roiphe’s piece, which has had five days to circulate, is among neither the most emailed, most blogged or most searched. For those of us who care, let’s consider her...
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(via luckylauralee)