November 20, 2012 Arts & Culture The Art of Friendship By Jessica Vivian Chiu Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition. When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too. Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends. Read More
November 20, 2012 Bulletin The Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2012: Shortlist By Sadie Stein The Literary Review has released the shortlist for the twentieth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The nominees for achievement in terrible sex writing include: The Yips, by Nicola Barker The Adventuress, by Nicholas Coleridge Infrared, by Nancy Huston Rare Earth, by Paul Mason Noughties, by Ben Masters The Quiddity of Will Self, by Sam Mills The Divine Comedy, by Craig Raine Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe Mr. Wolfe, you will recall, is a previous winner, having taken top honors in 2004 for I Am Charlotte Simmons. He was deemed eligible for this year’s awards by dint of passages like the following: But then the tips of her breasts became erect on their own, and the flood in her loins washed morals, despair, and all other abstract assessments away in a cloud of some sort of divine cologne of his. Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw—all without a word. Bad, assuredly. But is it bad enough to take the prize? Find out on December 4. Until then, follow the process via @lit_review. (The tweets are tagged as #LRBadSex2012.) And for a glimpse into the judging process, check this out:
November 20, 2012 Look The Year 476: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak History is full of linchpin dates around which the world is said to have pivoted. The year 476 is touted as the momentous one in which the Roman Empire fell and the world descended into a dark administrative vacuum inhabited by pillaging, horned demons. The reality is that, after blowing through dozens of emperors over the course of a generation, 476 was simply the year in which the ceremony of crowning yet another emperor didn’t seem worth the cost or trouble, and everyone stayed home. What is usually absent from the “Rome fell” story is that the eastern half of the Roman Empire flourished for another thousand years. In fact, 476 was when things were just getting interesting. The sixth-century historian Procopius wrote about his contemporaries in eastern Byzantine Rome in two works: one famous, one infamous. The first, the official history, paints a rosy picture of Emperor Justinian and his imperial accomplishments. The second, the “Secret History,” describes Justinian; his empress, Theodora; and their bosom companions General Belisarius and his wife, Antonina, as wicked, conniving, and so outrageously scandalous and beastly that the whole work has to be read as an act of either revenge or farce. Needless to say, the second one is a delight to read. The following panels are culled from both works, and from lore about the period: a miscellany on the exciting century that followed 476. Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
November 20, 2012 On the Shelf George Eliot’s Desk Stolen, and Other News By Sadie Stein George Eliot’s writing desk has been stolen from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. (It’s a lap desk, so that was easier than it sounds.) A local councillor calls the theft “a low blow.” “This event, mixing an author and an apartment, is just one of many such gatherings that have taken place at buildings across Manhattan in recent months.” Come for the reading, stay for the pricey real estate! Take heart from the fact that books are … bait? Look on his works, and tremble: all Tom Wolfe’s books, arrayed. In case you were wondering, Helen Vendler is reading John Ashbery and D. A. Powell. Among others. No novels, though! “If you like the precision and concision of poetry a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way.” “We liked the the double meaning of weather and communication,” says Jay Schwartz of Dictionary.com, which has named bluster its word of 2012.
November 19, 2012 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Sharon Olds! By Sadie Stein “Writing or making anything—a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake—has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.” —Sharon Olds, 2004
November 19, 2012 Arts & Culture Hatchet Job: When Bad Reviewers Go Good By Drew Johnson In February of this year, Adam Mars-Jones, an English writer not much known in this country, won the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award for his review of Michael Cunningham’s Nightfall: “And a two-person epiphany has to outrank the single kind. Two comely young people standing in the lake shallows, ‘looking out at the milky haze of the horizon’—that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard.” Geoff Dyer, another English writer, much better known since 2008’s Death in Venice, Jeff in Varanisi brought most of his strange work back into print, was nominated for his attack on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending: Later, after Tony has broken up with his girlfriend, Adrian commits suicide. This would be my first objection. Obviously people commit suicide, for a variety of reasons, but in fiction they tend to do so primarily in the service of authorial convenience. And convenience invariably becomes a near-anagram of contrivance. The impulse behind good bad reviews is not much understood, and whether understood or not, is usually disliked or dismissed. It’s considered ungenerous, as though generosity could never be misplaced. Read More