August 23, 2013 Look Nabokov on Joyce By Sadie Stein Of teaching Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Below is his.
August 23, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: ABCs, Akrasia, Antiquity By The Paris Review “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do / How can I ever change the things that I feel?“ This sentiment—so memorably expressed by Fleetwood Mac in 1977—is as old as philosophy itself. The ancients struggled to explain akrasia, or why we love and do certain things against our better judgment. Who’s in charge of our desires? As the NYU philosopher Jessica Moss points out in this Q&A, the latest psychological research can sound a lot like Aristotle’s Ethics. —Lorin Stein I found the cover of Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics—the torso of a marble Adonis that, at a cursory glance, looks sort of like an Abercrombie and Fitch bag—so off-putting that I took it off. (The British iteration, which features a bust of Athena in a pair of red sunglasses, is hardly more dignified.) But I understand that the publisher was grappling with the very same issue Beard, an eminent classicist, addresses in this book: how to engage with the classical tradition in a modern world. The book is both a survey of classical antiquity and a compelling argument for the classics’ contemporary relevance; Beard bridles at those who champion the canon from a romanticized or ideological standpoint. Anyone who has read Beard’s work in The New York Review of Books knows how funny and passionate a writer she is, and how convincing. (You can only imagine how much fun her Cambridge classes must be.) In her hands, the classics really do argue for themselves. So does this book. Sexy cover not required. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
August 23, 2013 On the Shelf Ancient Vintage, and Other News By Sadie Stein At various points, the FBI suspected William Vollmann of being the Unabomber, the anthrax mailer, and a terrorist training with the Afghan mujahideen. “Reviewers have the right to rate a book however they feel like, with absolutely no justification what so ever. Get over it princess.” A young writer accuses Goodreads of a culture of bullying. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a big fan of Victor Hugo. Italian archaeologists are growing grapes with an eye to crafting an ancient-style wine according to techniques described by Virgil.
August 22, 2013 In Memoriam Mr. Paradise By Jonathan Segura Leonard in his home office. Elmore Leonard died this week. This is terribly sad news. It’s terribly sad when the world loses someone fantastically gifted who also, through some cosmic fluke, is not a dick. Elmore Leonard was not a dick. He was nice. He wrote something like a book a year, and even the crap ones were better than most of what passes for decent fiction these days. And he was one cool motherfucker. We hung out one afternoon in October 2010 at his house in the suburbs north of Detroit. I was interviewing him for a story just before his ninety-millionth novel, Djibouti, was about to hit. He wore this black sweater with a scraggly beard and smoked cigarette after cigarette in his office, just talking. His daughter was in the other room futzing with this chair that was in the process of getting reupholstered. Gregg Sutter, Elmore’s longtime research man, floated in and out of the room a couple times, and Elmore sat there at his desk doing his third or fourth interview of the day—late in the day now—an eighty-five-year-old guy talking about how he’s got the best job in the world and why would he ever want to stop doing that? Apparently he didn’t. Sutter said recently that Elmore was banging away at his next book up until he had a stroke a couple weeks ago. Back then, we talked about a bunch of stuff. The usual chaff about his writing process (longhand, then typewriter), his aversion to all that social media junk, what he was writing now. (Stacked uneasily on a chair nearby was a stack of material about mountaintop removal that Gregg had dug up; it would become fodder for his last novel, Raylan.) He’d just unboxed his first cell phone. He smoked and talked dismissively about his atrial fibrillation and how “you can get a stroke easily with it” and so he took a couple pills for it every day and had bloodwork done every week or so. This was a serene, cool man much more like the smiley bemused grandpa pictured in his current official author photo. Previous versions featured a scowly guy rocking lavender-shaded sunglasses and a the-fuck-you-looking-at puss. I can’t imagine meeting that guy, after having met this guy. Read More
August 22, 2013 Quote Unquote Pride and Prejudice By Sadie Stein “You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.” —Ray Bradbury, the Art of Fiction No. 203
August 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Reader’s Block By Diane Mehta For a year and a half I read Helen Lowe-Porter’s sauntering, elegant translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain at the rate of about one paragraph a day. For months I envisioned Hans Castorp lighting up his Maria Mancinis or gazing at Frau Chauchat’s creamy white arm curving along the back of a dinner chair. The sentences were amplified with a key transitive verb or with a subtle detail of winter in Davos and then slowly unfurled. Inevitably, several sentences in, I would put the book down and polish some sentences of my own. This happened nightly. I made it through three-quarters of the book, to the point just after (spoiler alert) Joachim dies, and I cried again, just as I had a decade earlier when I first read the entire novel. During the day, I’d go to the writers’ space I belonged to in Brooklyn, a gloomy place filled with dark cubicles, and write all day. Never once did I flip open a book. That was for nighttime reading and always Thomas Mann. He, or rather Lowe-Porter, had the right tone for the book I was writing. Nearly two years later, dozens of books lie scattered on the floor beneath my bookshelves. Some are piled on top. These are the books I mean to read. Many I ordered in one fell swoop from Open Letter Books. Others are offbeat wonders from the NYRB Classics. A handful are poetry books that I’ve read and re-read for decades. But you don’t read poems as much as you hear them in your head. They go on and on, with no end and no beginning, as T. S. Eliot might have said. But you can, of course, read fiction. My neglected authors are an eclectic mix: César Aira, Willa Cather, Roberto Bolaño, Tanizaki, Sholem Aleichem, Thirty Umrigar, Mercè Rodoreda, Jean Genet, Natalie Sarraute, Jennifer Egan, Tessa Hadley, Christina Stead, Don DeLillo, and a dozen or so books by friends, which I promised I’d get to “immediately.” I envy my multi-tasking friends who read voraciously while they write. It started to worry me a little. I picked up books I knew I loved—like The Magic Mountain or The Master and Margarita—and put them down again after lingering over select pages. I made it part of the way through infuriatingly opaque books, including Gombrowicz’s Cosmos and emotionally compelling ones, such as Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, a beautifully composed and moving book told in the alternating voices of a 100-year-old woman and her therapist in the asylum where she lived out most of her adult life. It takes place in Sligo, a word that makes me swoon. Sligo County in Ireland is the setting for W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where he hoped to put his clay- and wattles-made cabin “and live alone in the bee loud glade.” Still, I put the book down. Read More