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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 Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (positive if qualified Times review here).
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I was making an Amazon wish list to distribute the spring semester reading list to my independent study. The last list I’d made was for Christmas 2006, and it’s a little startling how many of books and (non-downloadable) albums have since become unavailable, or are now available only as downloads.Dana Spiotta’s Eat The Document is out of print, but available from $ 0.01. You can still get the European version of Saint Etienne’s Tiger Bay on CD; worth it for the lovely “I Buy American Records” (!). Harold Brodkey’s gorgeous This Wild Darkness: The Story Of My Death is also out of print but available from $0.01, apparently the going rate. When Brodkey disciplines his larger arc, as he does in Wild Darkness, his sentence structures are so beautifully expansive:
I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
Jeffrey Eugenides reads and discusses Brodkey’s short story “Spring Fugue” in a New Yorker podcast.
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London Calling
Much recent goodness from the London Review Of Books.
Colm Tóibín’s review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life begins with “The Swimmer” and Cheever writing in his diary, after seeing a male figure by a swimming-pool, about the urge
to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world …
Eleanor Birne talks to Tracey Emin’s neighbors.
David Runciman reviews Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes, and knows that we think we know Bill:
In 1997, Bill and Hillary plan a celebration for Chelsea’s 17th birthday, but Hillary is late, so, Branch recounts, ‘Clinton found himself the delighted sole host to a dozen high school girls in raucous discussions of love and the world.’ I know what you’re thinking, and I was thinking the same. But a few pages later we discover what really turned Bill on about the occasion: he used it as an opportunity to give them all a little lecture about the scientific and moral implications of the cloning of Dolly the sheep.
Rebecca Solnit sees dry times ahead in Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell:
The central thread in this story of the West is the story of the Colorado River and the attempts to determine what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered, as it snakes through much of the major non-fiction of the West.
Might want to sell that house in Las Vegas sooner rather than later.
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"Cultural critique always relies on some idea of the way people ought to want to live, [which] can’t simply be inferred from looking out the car window"
