September 6, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Taxidermy, Heroines, Bad Ideas By The Paris Review There are moments, on a red-eye flight, when your brain is too jumpy and raw to figure out what, exactly, n+1 is arguing in its attack on “global literature.” When you can’t go back to your (global?) novel and don’t want to plug your head into a cooking show, and when sleep is out of the question. For such moments, pack Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island—a story collection that roams over the Irish landscape during and after the Boom, and through several dozen varieties of bad idea, from selling meth, to having children, to organizing an ale-tasting excursion in Wales. At the risk of indulging in cultural stereotypes, Barry is Irish: when he writes a story, he tells a story, and he’s not afraid of a sentimental ending, if one presents itself. Along the way, he takes such contagious pleasure in his flawed, incorrigible people that I was happy to be on a plane. —Lorin Stein In Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, Susan Howe writes, “I have loved watching films all my life. I work in the poetic documentary form, but didn’t realize it until I tried to find a way to write an essay about two films by Chris Marker.” The films in question are La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Howe splices her thoughts about these works together with childhood memories of watching Olivier’s Hamlet, the early history of Soviet cinema, an elegy to her husband, and the fallout of Hiroshima, among other subjects. It is an investigation, as she says, of “the immense indifference of history” and “the crushing hold of memory’s abiding present.” It is also, one feels, about the discovery of kinship between a documentary poet and a documentary filmmaker, via the essay—whose root meaning, as both Howe and Marker remind us, suggests experiment rather argument, and a commitment to the art of surprise. —Robyn Creswell Read More
September 6, 2013 On the Shelf Tolstoy Goes Digital, and Other News By Sadie Stein All of Tolstoy’s works are going online. “We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,” explains his great-great-granddaughter. The work on the site will have been triple-proofed by more than three thousand volunteers from some forty-nine countries. This week, FSG has collected a lovely series of Seamus Heaney reminiscences and tributes—by Jonathan Galassi, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Maureen N. McLane, Robert Pinsky, and more—on their blog. Maya Angelou will be the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. UK charity shops are overwhelmed with a glut of Fifty Shades books—unrecyclable due to the glue used in their bindings. (Recommendation: find the nearest motel.) A new app allows self-published authors to add their own sound tracks and effects to audiobooks. For good or ill.
September 5, 2013 Arts & Culture Pynchonicity By Gary Lippman “Paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much,” announces a character in the new novel Bleeding Edge—yet because its author is Thomas Pynchon, let’s not take that valorizing of paranoia too lightly; elsewhere the same character grouses about “when paranoia gets real-world.” More than any other recurring Pynchonian concept, paranoia receives nuanced treatment in the novelist’s work. A tendency toward the “p” word would seem to color his personal life as well: although he reputedly lives in plain sight on New York’s Upper West Side, he keeps his private life more private than that of any other major American artist. And, after being a stone Pynchonophile for nearly thirty years, I’ve finally started feeling a bit paranoid myself. It’s not the dot-com “hashslingrz,” Pynchon’s latest fictional conspiracy, that’s freaking me out, but the author himself. Never before has he set one of his novels in a time and place which I myself inhabited, and as I whooshed back to the New York City of 2001—this time through Pynchon’s aesthetic filter—his world spookily coincided with mine, mapping over it at points both minor and major. Call it a case of “Pynchonicity.” As it happens, I spent much of 2001 rereading the then-available Pynchon canon: the historical books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason And Dixon); the contemporaries set during Pynchon’s own adult years (The Crying Of Lot 49, Vineland); and his first novel, V., a hybrid of those two forms. I was thirty-eight then, Pynchon was sixty-four, and a goal of my project was to understand the man, to puzzle out what kind of mind could be equally open to profundity and vulgar puns, tenderness and cruelty, hard science and the occult, sweet lyricism and, well, Rainbow’s notorious shit-eating scene. Given Pynchon’s aversion to cameras, microphones, reporters’ notebooks, and public podiums, the texts were all I and his other readers had to work from. Read More
September 5, 2013 On Translation Franzen on Kraus: Footnote 48 By Jonathan Franzen Oskar Kokoschka’s 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. This week, to celebrate the launch of our Fall issue, we will preview a few of our favorite footnotes from “Against Heine,” Jonathan Franzen’s translation of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Click here to get your subscription now! And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.48 (p. 210) 48 J. D. Salinger might be an example of an American writer whose reputation has similarly benefitted from being read in people’s youth. But consider here, too, the periodic arguments from Bob Dylan fans that Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.
September 5, 2013 First Person My Nothing to Hide By Amy Grace Loyd I tried not to look. The couple couldn’t see me but I could see them, day and night, if I chose, and often enough I did. It’s a benefit or drawback of urban living that our sight lines in the tight geometry of New York City drive us into the lives of others, into private moments not meant for spectators, if we do not pull the blinds, if we don’t look away or past what’s on offer. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, as I still do, but at the time I found myself on the third floor of a jumble of an old building on the main drag, Montague Street. It’s a street more plaintively commercial and less pretty than the rest of tony Brooklyn Heights; it is more alive with neon and the coming and going of chain stores, salons, restaurants. And with noise, too—from the meals eaten, booze served, and the resulting high spirits, and then those ancient garbage trucks, circling and circling, their brakes screaming. I stayed too long in that one spot probably, but the rent was affordable, the Greek landlord fatherly, a friend who often treated me to dessert and stories, and I felt safe then in what I described as a garret but was merely two small rooms that vibrated from the ventilation units from the restaurant below. The front of my apartment looked out onto Montague. The rear faced an accidental courtyard, the back of the restaurant, Mr. Souvlaki, featuring a fountain that usually didn’t work, a small fenced-in patch of scattered plantings, and the backside of a few apartment buildings. The buildings were close, less than fifty yards from what was my combined kitchen and living room, and the apartment in which I came to see so much was slightly higher than my own, so my vantage allowed me to peer up and in, as if that one living space directly across the way was up on a pedestal. I can’t say when the couple moved in because when they did I’d been in love and my eyes were diverted inside me, charting the ways in which I felt discovered, opened up, prized, or to the moments I’d be near him again, inside the gold of his skin, the wiry lengths of his arms, or to the future of more love and his lips on the back of my neck and shoulders, his tongue writing messages there, everywhere, reaching inside my insides. And there was the pull of his intoxicating smell and even of his home, not in Brooklyn or in New York state, but further north in a place by the Atlantic dotted with sea roses and overrun with green so dense, during the season I met him, that it seemed in revolt, poised to take over. Read More
September 5, 2013 On the Shelf Secret Book Landscapes, and Other News By Sadie Stein These miniature landscapes, painted on the sides of nineteenth-century books, were recently discovered at the University of Iowa. Jokes (of varying degrees of hilarity) for grammar nerds. Adding to the indignity of Richard III’s parking-lot exhumation, scientists have now discovered that the monarch had worms. “Thy broken faith hath made the prey for worms,” wrote Shakespeare, calling it. Speaking of cross-pond exhumation! “Exhuming Poirot is disrespectful towards Agatha Christie’s careful burial,” argues John Sutherland in the Guardian.