April 2010
23 posts
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Fictional Divides
This week I’ve been reading Ander Monson’s Other Electricities and Alice Munro’s Selected Stories and thinking about which fiction gets classified as “traditional” or “experimental.” No two writers are the same, so any “tradition” oversimplifies the very things it’s characterizing. But there do seem to be writers who can be characterized as more interested in characters, plot and crafting scenes...
March 2010
27 posts
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That 70s Childhood
The Times’ Ross Douthat manages to partially blame the latest revelations of Catholic priests’ abuse and church cover-ups on those wacky 70s:
The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy.
Call it the conservative reversal: blame a crime (or sin, if you...
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"They had a reputation for being tough, austere,...
- Miranda Carter, on the GOP 19th Century Prussian nobility
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"I cannot tell you everything that we know. But...
- Colin Powell, describing the role of the novelist
(via Valerie Martin)
Valerie takes Powell’s words for the epigraph of her 2007 novel Trespass. Tonight she and Stanley Crawford gave readings at Amherst Books (she was my first writing instructor; he is teaching here at U Mass this semester).
She began her reading with the Powell quote, remarking that it was a terrific comment on...
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Mountains In Other Languages
The Times photo essay on trekking the 150-mile Annapurna circuit—the hike tops out at 17,769 feet elevation—makes me want to drop everything and book a flight to Kathmandu.
The highest elevation I have been to in the open air is the Jungfraujoch (11,388 feet). I was seventeen. My mother was having breathing difficulties from the altitude and stayed in the lounge above the train station but my...
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My friend Lauren Foss Goodman’s print debut is in the spring issue of The Massachusetts Review. It’s one of the selections the Review chose to make downloadable, so go get it!
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"What are those times that stand out, clear...
- Alice Munro
I’m reading her Selected Stories. Also Robert Thacker’s 1998 essay:
[critics seize] Munro’s work most often at these very “clear patches”; that is, at those points of story at which her art is most evident, and most pointed. There is real consensus that it is never transparent, always elusive, with points of view and meanings compounding, patterns...
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Our Daily Bread offers so little beyond the image... →
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"...a fun little sociological discussion followed... →
Jonathan Chait:
Today David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column. It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.
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Paula Cole, “Jolene”
Unplugged cover...
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The Professor's Wife
I found Tony Judt’s January NYRB piece on nights alone with ALS profoundly moving, his October NYU speech a clear, vital statement about the health care fight and the state of things between the American right and left. He is profiled this week in New York magazine. If you read about him, it is likely to be as “feisty,” brave, insightful, magisterial, brilliant.
Yesterday the...
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Levi's, "They Go On" Linked Ads, 1997
Six minutes of tripped-out dot-com era bliss (Tumblr users, video doesn’t show up in the dashboard)
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Damages
I shouldn’t be enjoying Damages as much as I am—the often exposition and recap-heavy dialogue, the characters’ willingness to resort to murder, the quick payoffs from readily-comprehensible schemes that are supposed to be fiendishly clever. Shot on video and edited with less elan, the show would be little better than a soap opera. (Although: Wallace Shawn! As a paraphilic jailed...
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Sovietski!
Soviet artifacts have the strangest quality of seeming to be ancient relics from a distant future. To me the jaw-dropping thing here (in Google’s occasionally off Russian translation) isn’t even the gargantuanism (James Cameron with an unlimited budget and actual military?) but how different the Lun battlestar ekranoplan—and the thinking and design sensibility behind it—is from...
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Today I'm Reminding My Students
to watch out for spelling eros
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Words & Music
• I’m in love with Josie Sigler’s poem in the current Pebble Lake Review (via E Wilcox)
• Leigh Stein read at the Montague Bookmill last week. She’s a terrific poet and reader, and also blogs (and has upcoming New York-area readings).
• I have been reading The New Republic a lot recently. It occasionally reminds me of the scene in Out Of Africa when Karen walks into the...
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Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute
Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points. Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman. She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people;...
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Saint Etienne, “Spring”
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"As the Soviet Union began to fall, she bounced...
- from Ellen Barry’s profile of Russian Booker Prize winner Yelena S. Chizhova:
Since [1996] she has written for six hours a day without weekends or vacations, producing five novels, three of them finalists for the Booker Prize. It is not surprising, given this, that she speaks about her work with moral urgency.
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Thoughts On Grace Paley
This week in my independent study we started Paley’s Collected Stories, and alongside my reactions I wanted to post the cover of the edition I am using, which though it doesn’t seem to me that I bought it so many years ago is already browning inwards from the corners.
Why scan a book cover when you can Google it, right? My laziness yielded a Google bonus: a copy with a Philip Roth...