Second Sex and Death
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Magnum Photos
Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1945
A good article titled “The Second ‘Second Sex'” about translation, specifically of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Have you translated? What are your problems/concerns with translating?
Another interesting one in The Chronicle about vampires and dead people in general: “All the Dead Are Vampires.”
A + B = C. de Beauvoir plus dead people = A Very Easy Death. I haven’t read this memoir of de Beauvoir’s mother’s death in a long time, but I remember it being a powerful meditation on death. Describing her mother’s fears after a fall in the bathroom that breaks her femur, de Beauvoir writes, READ MORE >
Loneliness
Haven’t really read anything beyond “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” but read that a while back and enjoyed it thoroughly. So, here’s one for Alan Sillitoe, to mark the old man’s passing. It’s Tuesday, go right ahead:
Salesmen
I really don’t understand the hard sell approach used by certain authors/vendors in aggressively trying to push their goods. Though you may be able to cajole me into forking over $$ for your book at the bookfair (I am a pushover, often), you sweating and awkwarding me into doing so will only guarantee that though I have your book inside my house now, I will never read it, and will likely think of you only often thereafter in a gross light, thus netting you perhaps one book sold but a whole trajectory made mushy. Come on. Relax. Be cool. Things go around. Invest in yourself. Not all sales happen at the point of purchase, and better things are friends.
On a side note, in one instance this past weekend at the Denver book fair when I was shown a book and didn’t buy it, the presenter told his friend passive-aggressively toward me, “Oh, check out HTMLGIANT… it’s a great site, if you like sex and hyperbole and death.” I think he thought it was an insult. I got it tattooed on my thigh.
This one never gets old:
This Just In: Poetry, Fiction & Literary Magazines Are Still Dying
A recent Mother Jones article by Ted Genoways, editor of Virgina Quarterly Review, suggests literature is dying because of the explosion of MFA programs and in turn, literary magazines and writers who look inward rather than outward in their storytelling. The really interesting conversation takes place in the comments where anonymous commenters and folks like Matt Bell and Gina Frangello both expand the discussion and take Genoways to task quite eloquently for his myopic and rather privileged outlook from within academia and his willful ignorance of the independent publishing community.
I have said it before but I will say it again. I remain weary of the ongoing, lofty prognostications about the death of literature, literary magazines, the printed word and so on. The conversation is getting so very tedious. Literature is dying the longest death in the history of deaths. It is amazing, really. If literature is dying, it is now time for a mercy killing so we can bury the dead, allow the dead to rest in peace, and surrender to the five stages of grief. I will never understand why magazines continue to publish articles which look backward rather than forward, in no way cover new ground or offer practical solutions that are grounded in hope rather than pessimism.
Uncategorized / 188 Comments
January 18th, 2010 / 6:21 am
January 18th, 2010 / 6:21 am
Nick Antosca—
“An Australian study found that every hour per day spent sitting in front of a TV or monitor raises your risk of early death from heart disease by 18%, even if you exercise and aren’t overweight.” What??? (via Jezebel)
14
Ken Baumann—
11 of the 20 titles on last week’s NYT Mass-Market Fiction Best Sellers list have death in the title. (via Dan Kennedy)
Junior High Dance
- Is my poor boy suffering? Are you Htmlgiant people having fun without me?
No, this is not a picture of htmlgiant contributors rocking out at the AWP. (Yes, I am jealous and bitter.) This is a photo of a junior high dance. My son is at one tonight. I sit at home, worried about him. When I think of junior high dances, only one thing comes to mind: me, at a dance at a roller-skating rink, they play the “slow song”, called, “I Like Dreaming (cause dreaming will make you mine)”, and standing alone watching people slow roller skate, my heart broken in two. Here is an A.A. Bondy song about dancing, and death, and the Rapture:
READ MORE >
Harold Pinter, RIP
Harold Pinter, who used his Nobel Prize win lecture to really give it to U.S. foreign policy, has died.
A few minutes from The Birthday Party: