July 30, 2012 Arts & Culture Dreaming in French By Brian Cullman Saint Cyprien On the rare occasions when Georges Alain is asked to list his occupation, he simply writes, “Dilettante.” Years ago, he was more comfortable describing his occupation as “surrealist,” but for as long as I’ve known him, more than twenty years, he has stuck with “dilettante.” In that time, he has published books of his poetry, exhibited paintings and sculptures, produced albums of Madagascan guitar music, designed wine labels for a vineyard near his home in Saint Cyprien, in southwest France, and set up a small and cheerfully primitive recording studio in an old, abandoned schoolhouse outside of Belves. Some years ago, when I wanted to record in the studio, he offered to let me work there for free if I agreed to dream only in French for the week preceding and the week following the sessions. The contract he presented me was very formal, fourteen pages long, and required multiple signatures. “What about the week of the sessions?” I asked before signing. “I don’t want to interfere with your process,” he shrugged. “Though, if you wish…” It should be no surprise that Georges Alain’s endeavors have gained him more friends than money, although he received a remarkable number of donations when, in 1999, he waged a brief campaign to have coq au vin declared France’s national bird. Read More
July 30, 2012 On the Shelf Writerly Recipes, Great Closers By Sadie Stein Vintage book art. The strange case of the Aleppo Codex. Eat like your favorite writers. (Maybe not Fitzgerald. Or Ginsberg.) The Boston of Infinite Jest. The ten best closing lines in literature. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 27, 2012 Books Two Versions, One Heti By Anna Altman I recently picked up a copy of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, out last month from Henry Holt, to find a favorite passage. It appeared at the beginning of the novel’s fifth act, or at least it had in the first copy I had read, a Canadian version published by Anansi in September 2010. But flipping through this new edition from Heti’s American publisher, I couldn’t find it. I felt disoriented and wondered if my memory was failing me, and as I looked more closely at the American version, I saw that much else had changed: passages had been deleted or transposed; new characters appeared; objects changed value and form. After a few minutes of searching, I found the passage I was looking for. It hadn’t changed much between the first publication and the second, but its new placement left me confused, and surprisingly disappointed. I wanted to find the book exactly as I’d left it, and felt the same as Jonathan Franzen, who recently expressed his misgivings about e-books: “When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing—that’s reassuring.” Books often feel like restorative, reliable old friends—and although Heti’s book hadn’t forfeited its material qualities, my assurance of its fixity had been shaken. Read More
July 27, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Dorian Gray, Sex with Immortals By The Paris Review Last Thursday, finding myself with an hour to kill in London, I stopped into Lutyens & Rubinstein bookstore in Notting Hill. No Paris Review (sigh), but I did pick up the Summer issue of Slightly Foxed, a quarterly devoted to little essays about people’s favorite books. The clerk claimed it’s the most popular lit mag they stock. And it’s easy to see why. Crome Yellow, The Lost Oases, The Elegies of Quintilius, and a guide to British sea birds give some idea of the miscellany. Read one issue back to back and you could cross every conceivable reader off your Christmas list. —Lorin Stein How, exactly, do a human and a god have sex? For Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s novel, it is less a question of metaphysics than of mechanics. “Bad enough to have a full-grown male swan jabbing webbed feet into your backside while he has his way, or a one-ton bull leaning his moaning weight on you,” she thinks. But when the god does not change form, how does the human body accommodate itself to “the blast of his desire”? What makes the passage so interesting is not only Costello’s amusing speculations on the impracticality of cosmic coupling but the way such a question allows Coetzee to reflect on the whole messy business of the god-human relationship. The gods may never die, he suggests, but that doesn’t mean they know how to live. —Anna Hadfield Read More
July 27, 2012 On the Shelf Kubrick, Steinbeck, and Stine, Oh My! By Sadie Stein Welcome to the National Steinbeck Center, the largest museum dedicated to an American author. Happy birthday, Stanley Kubrick. Here is a letter he wrote to Arthur C. Clarke. Happy birthday, Goosebumps. Watch the trailer for the adaptation of David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas. “Writers privately love two things: obsessing over rejection and watching their peers fail.” On blogging about rejection letters. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 26, 2012 Video & Multimedia Watch: Kipling on Truth in Writing, 1933 By Sadie Stein We are grateful to Open Culture for drawing our attention to this rare film of Rudyard Kipling. From 1933, it shows the sixty-seven-year-old author giving a speech to the Royal Society of Literature (and guests from the Canadian Authors’ Association) at Claridge’s. “We who use words enjoy a peculiar privilege over our fellows,” observes the voice of the (already-fading) British Empire. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]