May 26, 2015 My First Time J. Robert Lennon on The Light of Falling Stars By Dan Piepenbring Welcome to “My First Time,” a new video series where writers discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. This is a chance to see how successful authors got their start, in their own words—it’s the portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Kicking off the series today is J. Robert Lennon, who discusses his 1997 debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars. He explores the perils of reading one’s Amazon reviews, the process of finding an agent, and the experience of seeing the book’s cover for the first time. “Your first book is a thing that your entire life has gone up to creating,” he says. “You can’t preemptively decide upon the correct way for your book to be. You have to kind of discover it.” Tomorrow we’ll feature Gabrielle Bell—and later this week will come Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Christine Schutt. You can see a trailer with writers from future installments of “My First Time” here. This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them.
May 26, 2015 On the Shelf This Is the Era of the Dante Selfie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring #Dante750. Photo: Firenze Italia, via Twitter Milan Kundera has a new novel out, his first in a decade—but does anyone care? Kundera’s books epitomize a certain outmoded, chauvinist worldview: “I can’t help feeling that if anything will undermine Kundera’s long-term reputation … it will be his overwhelming androcentrism. I avoid the word misogyny because I don’t think that he hates women, or is consistently hostile to them, but he does seem to see the world from an exclusively male viewpoint, and this does limit what might otherwise have been his limitless achievements as a novelist and essayist.” Speaking of androcentric writers: Philip Roth’s much ballyhooed retirement “may well go down in history as one of the literary world’s greatest pranks.” Despite his many claims to have retreated from the public eye, Roth is still as visible as ever, even if he isn’t publishing new novels. Dante is still very much a public figure, too, having gone on an international charm offensive to celebrate his seven-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday: “More than a hundred events are planned. These include everything from the minting of a new two-euro coin, embossed with the poet’s profile, to a selfie-con-Dante campaign. (Cardboard cutouts of the poet are being set up in Florence, and visitors are encouraged to post pictures of themselves with them using the hashtag #dante750.)” And who knows? A hashtagged selfie with a Dante cutout might be just what you need to recharge your fatigued sense of awe, that emotion most abused by modernity: “You could make the case that our culture today is awe-deprived. Adults spend more and more time working and commuting and less time outdoors and with other people. Camping trips, picnics and midnight skies are forgone in favor of working weekends and late at night. Attendance at arts events—live music, theater, museums and galleries—has dropped over the years.” Don’t blame literature’s avant-garde, though; the state of the contemporary novel suggests that writers are spending more time in museums than ever before. “The avant-garde writers of today aspire to be conceptual artists, and have their novels considered conceptual art. This may be literature’s Duchampian moment. Welcome to the readymade novel.”
May 22, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Girls, Gangs, Gimlet Eyes By The Paris Review A still from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I’m hard-pressed to pick a favorite moment in Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian New Wave vampire western, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which was released late last year. It could be the opening scene, when the high-cheekboned Arash, dressed like a rebel without a cause, steals a big tabby cat. It could be the gorgeous silent scene of the transgender rockabilly character dancing with a balloon. But it’s probably the scene in which our heroine, the chador-clad vampiress known only as the Girl, is pressed against a wall, floating a few inches off the ground. Or appearing to float—turns out she’s actually standing on a skateboard. The shot is brief, but it epitomizes what’s so remarkable about the Girl: she’s never quite who you expect her to be, a monster, an angel, a victim, a hero. She’s all those and more—she’s a girl. —Nicole Rudick If you pull Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful Times off the shelf for its seemingly sunny title, you should know up front that it’s ironic—but that’s no reason to put the novel back. Set in 1950s Vienna, it follows a gang of four teens, all of whom nourish an obsessive anger against their parents and society. From their outbreaks of brutality and cruelty, which fall somewhere between juvenile delinquency and amateur terrorism, Jelinek draws the features of a society in agony, one that refuses to come to terms with its fascist past. Rainer, the gang leader, deforms existentialist philosophy to legitimate his desire for revenge. As Jelinek puts it, once intellectual concepts have been perverted, ideas become devious and deadly weapons. And this is where she’s most convincing: in demonstrating a kind of private fascism inherent in language itself, between friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. —Charlotte Groult Read More
May 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Lindworm By Sadie Stein An illustration of the Lindworm doing battle, circa 1477. Last night, as part of the Norwegian-American Literary Festival, four Norwegian writers—Gunnhild Øyehaug, Lars Petter Sveen, Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold, and Carl Frode Tiller—spoke at New York’s 192 Books. James Wood, who moderated, asked them to address the question of perceived Norwegian literary tropes like solitude and loneliness. Sveen pointed out another: the shared cultural knowledge of fairy tales. Of course, you’ll find solitude and loneliness there, too. Norwegian fairy tales are, even by the genre’s grim standards, dark, thematically and often literally, too (e.g. “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”). For an American audience, accustomed to tall tales that focus on the heroic, and devils who rarely do anything worse than argue with sharp-witted Yankee lawyers, Norway’s fairy tales are downright scary. “The Lindworm”—also translated, when it is, as “The Lindworm Prince”—is a story with variations across Scandinavia. The version anthologized in the seminal Asbjornsen and Moe collection goes thus: Read More
May 22, 2015 From the Archive You’re Going to See Real Madness By Dan Piepenbring MK III, 1964. Drawing for MK III. From “The Designs for Motion,” a portfolio and interview with the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely from our Spring-Summer 1965 issue. “Today we can no longer believe in permanent laws, defined religions, durable architecture or eternal kingdoms,” Tinguely said in the fifties. “Immutability does not exist. All is movement. All is static.” He speaks here to Laura Mathews; this was her first published work. If you were in my place, what questions would you ask? … I would ask first of all: why do things move in your work? It’s the most simple, and also the most complicated, question. And I answer: things move because if they didn’t move, they might move; that is, in trying to make static things I have tried what everyone tries, and I’ve found that one petrifies situations, the phenomena that one is trying to seize. And finally one finds that as you try to seize these things, the things tell you something. In our time, things race and revolve automatically; industry and automation dominate us and impose a rhythm on us. Faced with that kind of thing, my work must move to remain vital, to avoid obsolescence … one doesn’t admit it, but one knows very well that in moving machines one is faced with life against death. Movement is so natural and so forceful that it is a fundamental dynamism. And anyway, one wants machines to move … Read More
May 22, 2015 On the Shelf Size Matters, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A large, presumably very trendy book from the fourteenth century. Today in “Let’s Pretend There’s a Trend”: Are long novels enjoying a day in the sun? There are, after all, many of them being published this year. “People seem to be seeking wholly immersive experiences,” says one publicist. “They’re binge-watching, they’re cooking from scratch, going on ecotours. And there’s no more immersive experience than reading a good long book.” (Publicists for cocaine, LSD, and MDMA could not be reached for comment.) Fantasy authors, on the other hand, are advised to stop writing so many long novels. “A deluge of multi-volume epics has been published over recent years, each one in turn hailed as the next Game of Thrones, only to disappear within a few months as disappointed readers found reality didn’t match the hype … Most were by debut novelists, often interesting writers with some good short stories under their belt, pushed far beyond their technical abilities by an industry hungry for instant commercial success.” But if there are too many big books, there are also too many big literary festivals—in fact, the festivals are getting too big for their books, even for the big books. “What is the point of book festivals? To see your favorite authors on stage, hear them read from their books and in conversation? Or meet them, queue up to get their signatures in your first editions, and ask them questions?” While we’re at it, our data sets are growing too fast, too; this is your periodic reminder that the digital humanities are divisive and arguably counterproductive. The scholars who built Google Ngram “gave a presentation about how the specific year in which a book is set started getting mentioned much more frequently after the French Revolution, and hypothesized that this had something to do with a new sense of time in the modern nation-state. In fact, as a senior professor attending the presentation immediately pointed out, these were just the years when copyrights, including dates of publication, started appearing in the fronts of books.” There is, amid this outsize circus of excess, one man who isn’t big enough: the man who shot the artist Chris Burden with a .22-caliber rifle back in 1971. In the name of the humanities, this fellow was “willing to accept the risk that if he missed his target by inches, art could morph into homicide.” He’s an accountant now.