NBCC finalists 2010
Any surprises? Anything here you want to read but haven’t? Anything here you read but wish you didn’t. (Matt Bell has one that I know of!) [NOTE: I didn’t mean that I wish I hadn’t read Matt’s book. I am very happy to have read it. I meant he’s reading a book on this list and may or may not wish – see comments below – he wasn’t.] Do you care about prizes, or are they just dumb? A creative writing professor once told that the only people who really care about prizes are the other people who give out prizes, meaning: prizes neither reflect the “goodness” of the writing nor do they impact sales, etc., BUT one prize often leads to another prize leads to another prize, and on and on. [Full press release here.]
Fiction
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf
Jonathan Franzen. Freedom. Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
David Grossman, To The End Of The Land. Knopf.
Hans Keilson.Comedy In A Minor Key. Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. Faber & Faber.
Writers No One Reads
Do yourself a favor and add the unassuming goldmine of Writers No One Reads to your RSS feeds. An ongoing catalog compiled by the archivist genius behind A Journey Round My Skull, this blog showcases some real gems, such as A Life is Full of Holes, a book of tales by Moroccan storyteller Larbi Layachihe, transcribed and translated by Paul Bowles. The image to your left is Roland Topor’s out-of-print-and-crazy-expensive-on-Abebooks Stories and Drawings. Topor, if he’s known at all, is probably known for writing The Tenant, adapted into the Roman Polanski film-of-the-same-name. Look alive, y’all: these are the lists we’re all going to be on in 2124, and then someone is going to do a post on ħ吨米升克我的n吨 about us, and then the deadgods-of-2124 will comment being like “yeah i already know about them, here is a list of people _____ slept with and here are the brands of tissues she liked.”
On Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Love (1994)
The use of the tango music seems a clear nod in the direction of Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928). Like its surrealist predecessor, The Color of Love is an assault on the norms of vision. It is explicit; it shows too much.
A few years ago I had the privilege of studying avant-garde/experimental cinema with Ron Green at Ohio State. He introduced me to a lot of amazing and unsettling work. One of the most uncomfortable films I recall experiencing in that period was a voyeuristic film called “Martina’s Playhouse” by Peggy Ahwesh. I won’t go into detail about it, other than to say that it was my one and only experience with Ahwesh’s work until last week when I watched “The Color of Love.” I’ll give you a link to where you can watch this film at the end of this post. Beware, though, it is (arguably) a work of pornography.
Seminar in Sentence-Making #36: Nabokov Edition
This is from Chapter Two, Part 4, of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The protagonist, immigrant professor Timofey Pnin, has just had all his teeth pulled:
A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.
The first thing I notice is that the description isn’t static. It is wedded to narration in the forward motion of time. READ MORE >
“Nothing ever happens.”
This is the first installment of what I might call Litblogging Wis Frvr or something like that. Sort of an anthology-in-progress.
The Book: A Spiritual Instrument
by Stéphane Mallarmé
I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. READ MORE >
Andrew Weatherhead—
Matthew Rohrer reads two poems on a Poetry Foundation podcast and they get talked about and talked about. Heather Christle‘s insight is provided. Curtis Fox writes with a pencil.
3
Hey, baby, what’s your sign?
So, according to astronomers, we’ve been fucking fools. Gotcha, suckers, you thought you were an Aries, nope, turns out you only saw characteristics in yourself because you wanted to. Really, you’re a Pisces, or whatever.
But why is this important? If Facebook posts (or any popular media outlet) are any indication of anything, people care. People are pissed that their astrological sign may have been wrong. Most of my friends on Facebook are Giant-type people, or, at the very minimum, grad school social science/humanities types, by which I mean, they’re generally critical thinkers. So am I. And yet, everyday, I hit my widget button (F4) and read my horoscope. I’m going to approach this horoscope issue two-fold: first, why people care, then, why people care. That sounds tautological, and maybe it is, but that’s what I’m doing.