Comments on: A Top Three, by Zak Smith

By: Donald

Donald — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:49:21 +0000

How on earth is writing not art? What are you talking about? Sit down.

By: Donald

Donald — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:49:00 +0000

How on earth is writing not art? What are you talking about? Sit down.

By: Alec Battles

Alec Battles — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:18:30 +0000

Writing isn’t art, get that straight.

And you can’t make generalizations about what kind of life leads to great creativity.

Bach had a huge family, Chopin had a really difficult personal life, Proust sat in his bedroom all day, Joyce struggled with psychological problems and sometimes locked himself up with his schizophrenic daughter, Pynchon’s never let us known what he really does with his time, and as for all of the unnamed Egyptian scribes and Chinese calligraphers, not to mention the poets and spell-writers of ancient forgotten civilizations, their work was either paid for by patrons or nourished by the demands of the tribe.

By: Alec Battles

Alec Battles — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:18:00 +0000

Writing isn’t art, get that straight.

And you can’t make generalizations about what kind of life leads to great creativity.

By: Alec Battles

Alec Battles — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:13:51 +0000

Blah blah blah. Logos-possessed idiot taking a potshot at Zak Smith aside (I think he’s the best artist my country has seen since the internet arrived, thank you), you have to admit that the segment from Cave’s novel contains far more of the image, thereby far more of what’s eternally contemporary, than the Bolano.

By: Alec Battles

Alec Battles — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:13:00 +0000

By: Me and Bunny Munro, Several Months Later « Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Me and Bunny Munro, Several Months Later « Vol. 1 Brooklyn — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:52:52 +0000

[...] that, I went and reread Zac Smith’s piece over at HTMLGiant about the book: Book critics like Roberto Bolano because book critics look like Roberto Bolano (or his characters, [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:43:33 +0000

I think it might beBolano’s translator. I read Chris Andrews translations of “Last Evenings on Earth” and liked it. Natasha Wimmer translated both Savage Detectives and 2666, and there were sections in both books that I thought were boring. I thought when Melville died his job was serving clam chowder at some inlet town resturant, bitter and underapperciated.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:43:00 +0000

By: JP Moses

JP Moses — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:28:39 +0000

Q: “who cares what Bolano faced or how much life he lived? why should any of that matter on the page?” (Amy McDaniel)

A: the writer cares — bolano cared. take away that (“any of that”) and the page doesn’t matter. who cares what darwin faced during the beagle expedition? on the origin of species sucks.