Friday, November 20th, 2009
The London Review of Books personal ads that I shared a couple of weeks ago seemed popular. So here are three more. I’ll try to post a few every now and again:
Do you enjoy attending classical jazz concerts? Do you ever close your eyes and pretend you’re watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon? Me too! Inexplicably single Miles Davis, Hanna-Barbera enthusiast (M, 78) seeks giggling brass fan. No strings. Box no. 22/03.
I enjoy a neatly ironed trouser and women who carry the scent of spicy chorizo. Simple man, simple needs. 40. Box no. 21/02.
I passed up an opportunity to attend the 2009 International Biscuit Convention in Warsaw to write this ad. And I really like biscuits. And conventions. Warsaw, not so much. Biscuit convention-loving, Warsaw-indifferent man, 46, WLTM F to 50 with biscuit-baking/convention-hosting talent who preferably doesn’t live in Warsaw. Box no. 21/10.
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Friday, November 20th, 2009
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Christopher Hitchens reviews a forthcoming authorized biography of Arthur Koestler: “Otto Katz once said to [Koestler], ‘We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex—it’s a cathedral.’ Koestler liked this remark so much that he included it in his autobiography, thus attaining the status of one who could actually brag about his inferiority complex as if size mattered.” . . . I think I’ll award Sentence of the Week to M. John Harrison, for this, from his review of Stephen King’s latest mammoth, Under the Dome: “There are many different kinds of guns, and by the end everything but a nuclear weapon has been set off, in a kind of localized Stalingrad of the hick mind.” . . . Bernard Porter offers a provocative review of a history of the MI5, Britain’s secret intelligence agency. . . . Akiva Gottlieb reviews The Good Soldiers, David Finkel’s close-up account of the surge in Iraq: “Finkel writes concisely and vividly about trauma and regret, leaving us defenseless against the steadily accruing collateral damage of combat.” . . . Michael Greenberg reviews Kay Redfield Jamison’s new memoir about her husband’s death: “Inevitably, it will be compared to Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking. But Nothing Was the Same is a very different kind of book, told with less writerly detail than Didion’s but more direct emotion.” . . . John Sutherland believes that the second volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters will “blow away some of the murk befouling the poet’s reputation.”
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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
(Most) Thursdays (sometimes Fridays) bring a post about a paperback book.
Hendrik Hertzberg’s One Million consists of 200 pages, 5,000 dots per page. That’s one million total dots in the book, with two, three, or four dots (and their corresponding numbers) “called out” on each page with an explanatory note. For instance: “499,999: Christian hymns in existence.” The project seems meant, if this isn’t paradoxical, as a playful way to give you a headache.
A version of the book was originally published in 1970, but this is a thoroughly revised edition. (The only statistics that I assume strongly reflect the first version are the dozens that remain about Vietnam.) Hertzberg’s sly selections and juxtapositions are all we have to go on for a larger message. There are a lot of statistics about real estate and cars and employment (“22,000: newspaper jobs lost in 2008”), which seem appropriate given the financial story of the past couple of years. Less obviously explained is the abundance of facts about Texas; perhaps the lingering influence of the Bush years on Hertzberg, who writes about politics for The New Yorker.
As the pages gather on your left side, it does become easier to feel the impact of certain numbers, no matter how trivial: “696,853: Units of Wii Fit, the video game, sold in November 2008.” That’s just about one Wii Fit (in one month) for every hour that has passed since Mickey Mouse debuted in 1928. (continues) READ MORE >
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Having just published their latest effort, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
, the brilliant husband-wife translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky sit down with the Wall Street Journal to discuss what they’re currently working on (Doctor Zhivago) and their process more generally:
WSJ: How do you resolve your differences over the work, and do disagreements ever spill over into your personal life?
Ms. Volokhonsky: Richard is a native speaker of English. I’m a native speaker of Russian. My task is to explain to Richard what is happening in the Russian text. Then it is up to him to do what he can. The final word is always his. I can say this is not quite what the Russian says. Either he finds something that satisfies me or he says no, this is how we’re going to do it. We discuss endlessly and sometimes it becomes a nuisance because we return to it again and again even after the manuscript goes off. But we really don’t quarrel. It would be much more interesting if we did.
(Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)
(Via The Millions)
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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
The New York State Writers Institute asked 25 notable writers to choose a favorite book of theirs about New York (“state or city”) to come up with a “distinctive and slightly unconventional guide to reading more deeply into the spirit of the Empire State.” The first 10 books are revealed here, and I’m not sure about “unconventional.” Most of these books and authors (Edith Wharton, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, etc.) are very well known. One exception — to me, anyway — is Bronx Primitive
by Kate Simon. It was chosen by Le Anne Schreiber, who says this:
New York would not be New York without Ellis Island, and the immigrant millions who disembarked there to remake the city and themselves. Of the many classic accounts of life straight off the boat, my favorite is Bronx Primitive, Kate Simon’s rigorously unsentimental memoir of her 1920s girlhood. Its reigning virtues are clarity and candor about the physical and emotional environment that surrounded a young girl, transplanted to the Bronx from the Warsaw ghetto, a girl so lethally observant and renegade in spirit that she took pride in her tyrannical father’s epithet for her — “the silent white snake.”
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
The finalists for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award have been announced. Auberon Waugh started the award to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” We can only hope that Philip Roth will be discouraged, but that doesn’t seem likely. He is nominated for a scene in The Humbling
, which evidently includes this sentence: “It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.” How could he possibly not win?
Other candidates are thrilled, or at least have people thrilled on their behalf. Singer Nick Cave was nominated for a scene in his novel The Death of Bunny Munro
, about a door-to-door lotion salesman. “Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn’t shortlisted,” said Anna Frame of Canongate, Cave’s publisher.
Richard Milward, 23, was selected for a scene in his novel Ten Storey Love Song
:
Comprising just one paragraph and replete with graphic sex scenes, Milward’s second novel follows the story of Bobby the Artist as he becomes a star and then sinks into drug-induced psychosis.
Milward, who accepted the prize in 2007 on behalf of the late Norman Mailer, said he “would have been upset” if he hadn’t been shortlisted this year. “I’ve been there before and I’ll be there again . . . There’s so much bad sex in my book that this is a nice accolade,” he said.
May the worst perv win.
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