Wednesday Reading
Jonathan Franzen doesn’t like e-books. I read Freedom on my Kindle. If he wants to defend printed matter, he should maybe not write a book that weighs a million pounds (KIDDING). Also, Franzen’s least favorite things (via The Millions). Franzen is angry in a placid, intellectual way.
At N Plus One, Molly Fischer discusses lady blogs. And then there’s this wonderful response. I enjoy some lady blogs and especially The Hairpin but appreciated both perspectives.
Is anyone reading Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land? Fascinating, yes?
Barnes & Noble is taking a stand against Amazon’s encroachment on the publishing industry.
Speaking of people making Amazon-related decisions, Goodreads is transitioning to new data sources.
Also, Amazon’s earnings fell. Rough week for them, but like Drago in Rocky 4, they’ll muscle through until a Rocky rises out of the Siberian chill to put up a good fight.
At Largehearted Boy (celebrating its tenth anniversary), Hanne Blank shares her book notes from her recently released Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, which got a great review in The New York Times. There’s also an interesting interview with Blank at Salon.
John Scalzi is contributing the proceeds of his e-book sales from his titles at Subterranean Press to Planned Parenthood for the next week.
Here’s an interesting piece on how records are made, literally.
Erica Dreifus offers a list of places where you can submit your flash nonfiction.
Colossal, an art and design blog, always has really unique art to look at.
Hey, it’s February.
A PRODUCT THAT WANTS TO DIE
The book cover of a product is its image. Also its comments section and its Facebook page. All but deleted.
There are the tired images of materiel pleasures we no longer desire.
They are like older actresses, or Twentieth Century genre fiction gone out of fashion. They are Tom Clancy and Leon Uris.
Music Roundup: Martin Seay, Annie Gosfield, The Smiths
1.
My favorite thing I read on the internet last year was Martin Seay’s epic essay on Ke$ha, the Beastie Boys, and Beyoncé:
Although “TiK ToK” contains stupidity—in much the same way that a Twinkie contains high fructose corn syrup—it is anything but a stupid song. Unlike three decades’ worth of kegstanding fratboys, Sebert misses the point of “Fight for Your Right” deliberately: she interprets the Beasties’ (limited and unsuccessful) attempts at irony and connotive suggestion as amounting to no more than inefficiency, and as such she excises them. […]
It’s erudite, funny, and very, very correct.
2.
Blake, this is for you. (Play it LOUD!)
3.
I wrote some posts at Big Other about overlooked Smiths songs:
- Part 1: “The Smiths”
- Part 2: “Meat Is Murder”
- Part 3: “Strangeways, Here We Come”
- Part 4: “Hatful of Hollow”
- Part 5: miscellaneous uncollected songs
- Part 6: a chart explaining where you can find every Smiths song
Roundup / Comments Off on Music Roundup: Martin Seay, Annie Gosfield, The Smiths
January 25th, 2012 / 1:51 pm
January 25th, 2012 / 1:51 pm
Sunday Reading List
Over at The Rumpus, Elissa Bassist offers great advice on how to write like a funny woman.
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for their 2011 book awards.
Edith Wharton turns 150 on Tuesday and she still looks great. The New York Times gives her a nod as they talk about heiresses and social climbers and such.
Anil Dash discusses the web as a medium for protest.
On her blog, Anna Leigh Clark shared an image of the most amazing writing group that included Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Lori Sharpe, and Audrey Edwards, among others. I want to know absolutely everything about this group now.
Margaret Atwood revisits The Handmaid’s Tale, which has remained in print since 1985.
Cory Doctorow’s essay about a vocabulary for speaking about the future is really interesting.
Are you watching Downton Abbey? Team Mary, right? And Edith; she is the worst. Over at The Millions, an essay about the literary pedigree of the show. Also, Shit the Dowager Countess Says and Downton Abbeyonce. You’re welcome.
Jennifer Weiner looked at the gender breakdown for reviews in the Times for 2011.
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote a… curious essay about Joan Didion that included the assertion that to really love Didion, you have to be a woman. Like I said, curious.
New Year Roundup
We’ll get started with the Literary Magazine Club of discussion of Versal on January 9th. Details, here, if you’re playing along. If you want to write something about Versal, and I hope you do, please get in touch with me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. There’s a lot to talk about. For starters, what do you think about the cover?
Over at the Paris Review blog which is always entertaining, Jason Diamond writes about, among other things, “books as objects of design in clothing stores.”
The Millions has a useful list of books we can look forward to in 2012.
James Franco* sold his novel to Amazon. It’s a scandal! Or something! I mean, he’s what? Congratulations? I don’t know! It’s going to be called Actors Anonymous, and yeah…. I, there are no words. Actually, there are words. I am going to make a plot prediction. Young, “handsome” and intelligent actor named Fames Danco takes Hollywood by storm, makes quirky choices, struggles to remain authentic amidst the hypocrisy of Hollywood. After taking a starring role in a big budget movie, say, Mission Impossible 14, he joins a support group, tongue in cheek, to cope with being torn between fame and being true to himself. In the end, he finds a happy compromise by making great independent film choices that lead to many critical accolades and magazine covers. When he wins his Oscar, he thanks the Academy and the nameless members of Actors Anonymous. He also finds love. I will take bets on the accuracy of my prediction.
At Full Stop, Maud Newton takes on the situation in American writing as part of an ongoing series. As always, she is savvy and insightful.
The Rumpus is starting a print publication, where four times a month, or so, they will send you a letter. I’m excited for this. I may be writing a letter. I love getting postal mail. You should consider subscribing.
A League of Their Own is a classic sports film.
Michiko Kakatuni, Twitter, fake account, this is the future.
This movie poster really exists.
Small towns are losing their post offices and it is a real shame.
*Is anyone else disturbed by the Franco storyline on GH right now?
Weekend Reading and Such
PressBooks, a new way to make an ePub and print-ready PDF of a manuscript, is open to the public. I haven’t used the service yet but it seems interesting, particular when so many small presses are trying to find affordable, uncomplicated ways to create e-books.
At The Millions, Edan Lepucki explains her reasons for not self-publishing. Both the essay and the comments are interesting.
In cool news, Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You is the December selection for The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk’s book club. You can buy the book here.
This may be the best corporate apology ever.
I really enjoyed this interview with Dagoberto Gilb on the Zyzzyva blog (via Chris Arnold).
John Branch’s three-part series on the life and death of hockey player Derek Boogard is some of the finest long form journalism I’ve read in a while. Boogard’s story is at once infuriating, intriguing, and ultimately, heartbreaking. I learned that there are “enforcers” in hockey which makes the sport seem infinitely more menacing.
On the Paris Review blog, Avi Steinberg writes about the art of air travel crises.
A leaked memo from Hachette explains why publishers are still relevant.
My List of Books From 2011
Because it’s that time again. My personal list of favorite books from 2011, or some books I found to be particularly significant, insightful, brilliant, masterful, enjoyable, notable. In no particular order.
Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist – by Doug Rice (Copilot Press, 2011)
“She moved, like any other apparition, from darkness to light. It’s what makes a photograph possible.” – Read my review of it here.
Compression & Purity – by Will Alexander (City Lights, 2011)
Another one from prolific surrealist poet Will Alexander.
“I am never given due as to sum or proportion / I am seen as the source of something leprous / as no longer the motive of who I was thought I was shaped to be.”
Pleasant and Painful Experiences
1.
A few weeks ago, Glen Duncan reviewed Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and he certainly got a vocal reaction, not necessarily because it was a less than glowing review but because of how he wrote the review, the strange and insulting analogies he made and so on. In his review he, among other things, attempts to predict what those ultimate arbiters of literary taste–Amazon.com reviewers–might have to say. As he discusses the literary nature of the novel, Duncan writes, ” We get, in short, an attempt to take the psychology of the premise seriously, to see if it makes a relevant shape.” He also revisits this idea of porn starts, throughout. Ooh! He said porn star in a literary review! Edgy! Today, he wrote a defense (???) of his review. He responded to the criticism of his criticism with more criticism! Meta! The follow up can be summarized thusly: You are all haters who didn’t understand what I wrote.
A Survey of 90s + Early-Internet Love Poetry
Since I’m only 23, it’s hard for me to understand love without the Internet. Probably all the times I’ve been in love, the Internet has been involved. Let’s consider some poems from the 1990s and early 2000s that feature love.
From a design standpoint, many of these poems suffer and thrive within the limitations of early web design utilities. There are strange boarders, floral .gifs, and extensive breaking with conventional wisdom on fonts.
In terms of how these poems make me feel, there is a note of desperation and of severe emotion in these works. They seem spiritual – and often are explicitly religious. They are from a time before online dating was common. They are from a time before Facebook. Electronic detachment was fresh.
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