September 17, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: MFA Microculture, Comfortable Middle Age By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading. The Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin’s uncollected prose. So absorbing I woke up thinking about it this morning, showered and shaved, and stepped back into the shower. (“You’re wet. You showered,” was my first non-Baldwin thought of the day.) —Lorin Stein “The First Tycoon of Teen,” Tom Wolfe’s 1964 profile of pop wunderkind Phil Spector—“the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld.” At 23, Spector had already produced “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Be My Baby,” “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Uptown,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.” “I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music,” Spector tells Wolfe. “It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have presidents like Lincoln anymore either.” —David Wallace-Wells A recent poem from The New Yorker called, “On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age.” It goes: “O Sting, where is thy death?” —Daisy Atterbury In the midst of a renewed discussion about female writers and their relationship with the literary establishment, This Recording re-published a piece written by Margaret Atwood in 1976 entitled “On Being A ‘Woman Writer.’” Atwood is clear, calm, thorough and undeniably relevant: it wasn’t until I got to the bottom of the essay that I realized the piece was over thirty years old. —Miranda Popkey Elif Batuman’s astounding “Get A Real Degree” in the London Review of Books, which begins as an focused inquiry into the MFA program microculture but expands outward and outward and outward again, until the entire horizon of post-Quixote literature has been pulled into view. —D. W.-W. I recently watched The Red Stuff, a documentary about the Soviet Union’s race to space. It’s bizarre to see Russian astronauts, especially those now past their prime and overweight, surrounded by Russian space memorabilia. But what I wanna know? Space ice cream. Do the Russians now sell it at their science museums like we do? Also recently viewed: IMAX: Hubble 3D, about the last flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. The images of earth are so beautiful that I cried. —Thessaly La Force A mesmerizing essay in The Nation on Javier Marías and his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by the man I’m beginning to think is the best critic writing today, William Deresiewicz. “Marías’s Europeanness is of the autumnal variety, much in evidence in recent decades, the product of a ripened civilization that feels itself equipped for nothing but the harvest,” Deresiewicz writes. “Reflection in James or Proust,” he continues, “isn’t a commentary on the story; it is essential to the story. It hugs the plot like a lining of a coat. It exposes character, develops relationships, shapes action. It gives utterance to feeling and direction to choice. It evolves, as the protagonists themselves evolve. But reflection in Your Face Tomorrow rarely does any of those things; it simply sits alone in its study, watching the plot go by.” —D. W.-W.
August 27, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Star Trek, Swede Levov! By The Paris Review You must look at this casting sheet for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wesley Snipes as Geordi? I mean, come on! Talk about parallel universes. —Thessaly La Force I am always eager to read a new essay by Doubleday editor Gerald Howard. His latest (in Tin House) is about depictions of working-class life in new American fiction—or really, the lack thereof. —Lorin Stein I’m reading American Pastoral, which has elicited startling responses in public. The quantity and sheer magnitude of the comments I get! One time I opened the book near a window in a coffee shop. A passerby stopped dead, peered at the cover for confirmation, and then starting banging on the window shouting, “Swede Levov! Swede Levov!” —Daisy Atterbury Dan Engber has written a delightful cultural history of quicksand. “Time was, a director could sink a man in the desert and still win the Oscar for best picture. Today, that gimmick has been scorned in third-rate schlock.” What the heck happened? I say: bring it back. —Thessaly La Force I have also been catching up on the posts of (sometime diarist) Rita Konig. Rita blogs about decorating for The New York Times. Her current post is about washing machines. I have never owned a washing machine. I have never thought about owning a washing machine. I have no interest in washing machines. And yet I find Rita’s interest addictive. (No doubt Gerry would have something perceptive to say about that.) —Lorin Stein I’ve just finished The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s entrancing account of a walking journey through Suffolk, England. This sublime work doesn’t just confound traditional literary taxonomies: it actually exposes the slightness of the very question of genre. —Mark de Silva In honor of the upcoming U.S. Open, I’ve been rereading David Foster Wallace’s on tennis—the Times piece on Roger Federer and the Esquire piece he wrote on Michael Joyce. His sense of wonder is almost childlike. —Miranda Popkey
August 20, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sinner Semester, Tony Judt By The Paris Review Raced through a great book this week, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. He took a semester off from Brown and went undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University. The portrait he paints of the place is nuanced and fascinating. —Caitlin Roper I was amazed to learn, from the strangers at Wolfram Research, that the best hangman word is not “syzygy” but “jazz.” And by the inimitable Jed Perl on Salvador Dali and his “cosmic junkyards,” and what one presumes will be Tony Judt’s last published essay. And, finally, anyone caught up in the resurgent moralistic fuss over steroids and baseball should read Eric Walker’s definitive and dismissive “Steroids, Other ‘Drugs,’ and Baseball.” —David Wallace-Wells “The Burdens of Manliness,” an article in the summer 2010 Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. John M. Klang makes an amusing disclaimer: “I am sure to provoke disbelieving groans from some of the thoughtful readers of this Journal … I should add at the outset, however, that mine is neither a contrived joke borne of some middle-aged fraternity dare nor a stale plea left over from the sensitive troglodyte yearnings of the 1980s Men’s Movement.” —Daisy Atterbury Seeing as Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, is coming out in a few weeks, I thought it might be worth re-reading his last, Remainder. It was. In contrast to many recent “novels of ideas,” McCarthy doesn’t discuss concepts and theories: he sets them in motion, in a way only the narrative arts can—leaving the discussion for his readers. A beautifully rendered work. —Mark de Silva Finally picked up Paul Harding’s Tinkers, the tiny book from Bellevue Literary Press that won the Pulitzer last year. I recommend it. —Thessaly La Force I’ve been slowly making my way through The Magic Mountain. For the length of an entire subway ride, I can escape to a European sanatorium, where six-course meals are served by dwarves, young ladies whistle with their nitrogen-inflated lungs, and naps on reclining deck chairs are mandatory. —Miranda Popkey Rereading The Beautiful and Damned. Why? Because there it was at St. Mark’s Books, and there I was late for a haircut with nothing to read—and because, really, what could be better? —Lorin Stein
August 13, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Robot Memoir, Memento Mori By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading. I’ve been fascinated by Popular Science‘s articles on robots. First there’s Larvabot—Hiroshi Ishiguro’s new telepresence robot meant to “transmit the presence” of people in other places by mimicing their voice, face, and movements. Imagining people hugging these “minimalist humans” that pretend to be their friends makes me feel weird and lonely. What would David Foster Wallace have to say about this? Then I see that another robot is updating its Twitter account. I wonder: will robots ever start writing memoirs and short fiction? —Natalie Jacoby Over the weekend I tore through Style—a series of lectures given in 1955 by the witty English critic (and code-breaker) F. L. Lucas. The book addresses such topics as rhythm, urbanity, and brevity—and has them all. —Lorin Stein While on vacation, I read All the Living, C. E. Morgan’s début novel, in under a day. She told The New Yorker, after being named a “20 Under 40,” that it took her just two weeks to write the first draft, then another two semesters (while in graduate school!) to polish it up. Fast read, fast write. But damn, what a book. —Thessaly La Force Julia Whitty writes equally beautiful prose about the ocean and the horror of the BP oil spill. We published her dispatch from the North Atlantic in our summer issue. Her new piece in Mother Jones on the BP cover-up is a must-read. —Caitlin Roper E.B. and Katherine White’s Subtreasury of American Humor is so much better than it sounds. The stories here aren’t humor pieces as such, but writing that has a sense of humor—a chapter of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which actually is funny) next to a chapter of Babbitt (which isn’t, and isn’t trying to be, but also is). Perfect for bed. —L. S. I’ve been marveling over these short reflections on Jane Austen, filmed during a recent Morgan Library exhibition devoted to her work. And I can’t stop sharing Robin Hanson’s brief meditation on detail. —David Wallace-Wells Ariel Dorfman’s Nelson Mandela lecture (on the importance of remembering and, occasionally, the convenience of misremembering) is still the talk of South Africa. Us humble non-attendees can read it here. —Anna Hartford S. G. Dunn, in the preface to a beautifully crafted (and tiny) collection of Coleridge’s poetry, lent me these words (written in 1918) for a week’s worth of reflection: “For some time there has been evident, in England as elsewhere, an increasing distrust of modern civilization. The huge frame of it, we feel, is not ‘constructed right’. We have sought our happiness in material wealth; we have looked for peace from industrial prosperity; and the result of our endeavors has been not peace, but war. […] We need to remember that the soul of a nation, the true ideals of its civilization, are expressed in its poetry; that the poets are the legislators, though ‘unacknowledged’, of mankind.” —Stephen Andrew Hiltner Also, though it is such a meme it might be a bit futile to add it here, Christopher Hitchens’s cancer announcement in Vanity Fair. A memento mori if ever there was one. —A. H. Franzen on the cover of Time. Yes. —L. S.
August 6, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Alice Illuminated, the Pelé of iPads By The Paris Review What we’re reading this week. After seeing Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I’ve been looking through Lewis Carroll’s original text. The British Library has a copy of the 1864 illuminated manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, conveniently online. The illustrations are delicate and charming. They’re much like Carroll’s handwriting, neat and subtle, with no trace of the macabre imagery in Burton’s movie. Alice is worth returning to again and again. —Daisy Atterbury Four middle-aged strangers, stranded late at night in a railroad station, begin speaking of love. Soon each is telling the story of his one great romance. It sounds like a lost work of Turgenev—and sometimes it reads that way too—but it’s My Kind of Girl, by the mid-century Bengali poet Buddhadeva Bose. First published in 1951, out next month in a new translation by Arunava Sinha. —Lorin Stein. At the risk of stating the obvious, wasn’t that some piece about Gil Scott Heron? —L. S. In the week that Newsweek was bought for a dollar, and Wikileaks dominated the news, I read up on the changing media landscape. I read John Koblin’s article in the New York Observer about Scott Dadich, executive editor of digital development at Condé Nast, with great interest. Dadich’s job is to help magazine editors develop their iPad applications. I’m fascinated by this new frontier, professionally and personally. Dadich is incredibly talented. In Koblin’s piece, he’s compared to Jesus, Pelé, Miles Davis, and Frank Lloyd Wright. —Caitlin Roper Scavenged for all things Heidi Julavits after reading her story, “Multiples of Cohen,” in the latest Harper’s. —Anna Hartford As a cyclist, I’ve been alarmed to learn from Republican electoral candidates that I am part of a vast biking conspiracy, started by the UN, to use bike lanes to take away people’s freedom. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’ve started Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a story about a planet where gender roles are obscured, just in time for the California District Court’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. I picked up my copy, a classic early seventies hardcover edition with wonderfully strange modernist artwork, for fifty cents on somebody’s stoop near the office. —Patrick Loughran What is an editor to do with a galley of the annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? I have yet to find a fun way to feature the book on the Daily (suggestions are welcome). It’s more information than I’ll ever need. When is it the hunting season for partridges? Did you know that Epsom salts derive their name from the fact that they were originally made by boiling down mineral water from Epsom? Or that Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778), was perhaps the first work to explore the notion of embarrassment? Is possible to overdose on Jane Austen? —Thessaly La Force Also loved John Bowe’s piece in The New York Times Magazine about music copyright enforcers. Bowe delves into a facet of music copyright that I haven’t considered, and it’s a rough one—he follows a BMI licensing executive as she goes door-to-door to collect licensing fees for music that restaurants are already playing. The article gets at the question of how we feel about paying for music, a subject I never tire of. In June, I donated to Creative Commons after reading this letter from their creative director in response to ASCAP’s fundraising letter decrying what they characterized as efforts to “undermine” their copyrights. —C. R.
July 30, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Papa, Pig Earth By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading this week. I wrapped up A Farewell to Arms just in time to enjoy the Hemingway look-alikes at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, Florida. Kudos to Charles Bicht, Papa 2010. —Stephen Andrew Hiltner First published in 1935—but set in the 1880s—A House and Its Head is a late, obsidian instance of Victorian Survivor Literature. It concerns a tyrannical father, his idle grown children, and the young second wife he brings home to them. Imagine The Way of All Flesh written by a woman under the influence of Oscar Wilde. What I and everyone else especially like about Ivy Compton-Burnett is her dialogue. Her characters make asides, they soliloquize, they turn epigrams, and yet the effect isn’t exactly stagey. (As Oscar liked to say, “Art doesn’t imitate life; life imitates Shakespeare, as best it can.”) —Lorin Stein I visited Cuba for the first time in January. On Revolution Day, July 26, I read about Fidel Castro’s surprise appearance in public and the rest of the coverage of the holiday I could find. Unsatisfied, I found and read “Cuba—A Way Forward,” the riveting, deeply distressing report from Daniel Wilkinson, Deputy Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch and Nik Steinberg, a researcher there, in the New York Review of Books. It makes me desperately sad to think about the amazing people I met in Havana that have almost no chance of reading Yoani Sánchez’s incredible blog, even though they live in Havana, as she does. Wilkinson and Steinberg are forceful and eloquent on the reality of the political situation in Cuba: “It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems.” —Caitlin Roper I’ve been following the debate surrounding Odyssey, Andrew Wylie’s latest venture in publishing e-books with Amazon. As an observer, I find it upsetting that the publishing world is squabbling over backlist e-book rights. But do I blame them? The pie is shrinking for everyone. Except Amazon. —Thessaly La Force I’ve been reading Pig Earth, John Berger’s cycle of stories, essays, and poems about peasant life in the Savoyard village where Berger settled with his family in the mid-seventies. This cycle is also a study in oral tradition, and of life in a place where nobody has any secrets. It is also—according to Wikipedia—a novel. But I’ll keep you posted. —L. S.