Monday, February 8th, 2010
In college, a good friend of mine used to bemoan news of his favorite rock stars being in happy relationships, because he figured that meant the ensuing records would be no good. The idea that artists in any medium create sharper work when they’re unhappy—and that unhappiness is a more fertile subject than happiness—is a potent, long-standing one, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it. As Amy Bloom puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times: “Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries.”
Terry Teachout recently shared this excerpt from The Watch That Ends the Night
by Hugh MacLennan:
Happiness is one of the hardest things to write about, and the difficulty of doing so makes me long to be a musician or a painter, for painters and musicians are at ease with the supreme emotion, which is not grief but joy abounding. To be able to make a joyful noise unto the Lord or a praise of colors and forms would seem to me to equate any man with gods or little children. Happiness annihilates time. We measure history by its catastrophes, we recall the weather by its storms, but the periods of peace and joy—who can describe them?
It does seem that painting and classical music are two of the only art forms that can safely approach the subjects of contentment and joy. Which is to say that abstraction can approach it. Much rarer is the book or film that does the same—Mike Leigh’s brilliant Happy-Go-Lucky comes to mind. But what about books? Ingrid Norton says that J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country accomplishes the feat:
Carr tells a tale of happiness which burnishes such a strong and subtle impression in the mind of the reader that it seems you yourself have passed through the season of contentment Carr describes.
READ MORE >
Friday, February 5th, 2010
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Mary Gaitskill reviews the “strange and wonderful” Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic: “Baba Yaga’s hut is a place of chaos, riddles, slippage, and between-ness, where life lives in death, beauty nests inside pestilence, and mothers suck their daughter’s breasts. In this place, kitsch and cuteness are on speaking terms with the highest refinement, the deepest sufferings and joys; Ugresic can move from one state to the other with earthy grace.” . . . William Deresiewicz doesn’t mince words about Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, calling it “a handful of crumbs, a bit of lint, a few coins . . . a sham, a scam.” . . . A “warm, fair” biography of Paul McCartney “offers a reconsideration of the dynamics of the band and McCartney’s role in it, arguing that Paul was as much a leader as John.” . . . Claire Dederer reviews the lovable “grouchy academics, pissed-off orphans, and melancholy middle-aged lawyers” in Amy Bloom’s latest collection of stories. . . . Charles Peterson reviews new books about Facebook and MySpace. . . . Alan Light reads new memoirs by two rockers who are used to being in the background, behind Sting and Springsteen, respectively. The results “aren’t satisfying as either literary efforts or historical documents.”
READ MORE >
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Joanna Smith Rakoff remembers her time answering J. D. Salinger’s fan mail. . . . John Seabrook once went to Salinger’s house to watch a movie. . . . And editor Tim Bates recounts communicating with Salinger in the 1990s when his books were being repackaged in the UK. . . . Lord, how I love Jill Lepore. (“I suspect that reading A People’s History at fourteen is a bit like reading The Catcher in the Rye at the same age.”) Some commenters take umbrage, but I think they’re (slightly) twisting Lepore’s point in order to take umbrage. . . . Abe Books gathers its top ten books about drink. Some priceless covers in the batch. . . . John Scalzi writes a scathing, very funny post about being on the author end of the Amazon-Macmillan dustup. (“Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It’s easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them.”) . . . On the same subject, Caleb Crain with a customarily thoughtful look at the possible future of book publishing. . . . Jessa Crispin writes about “spinster fear” and defends the books of Elizabeth Gilbert. . . . Charles McGrath profiles Don DeLillo, and elicits this quote, which both confirms DeLillo’s humorlessness and cements his lifetime ban from any parties I throw: “I only smile when I’m alone.” . . . A new blog interviews designer Carin Goldberg. (Via Casual Optimist)
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Thursday, February 4th, 2010
In one of those odd cultural clusters that sometimes come along, I went from never having heard of David Peace (that I could remember) to hearing only of David Peace. Or so it seems.
At a friend’s place for dinner the other night, the friend raved about Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Four
, the first book in a series of four known as the Red Riding Quartet. In Nineteen Seventy-Four, a Yorkshire crime correspondent investigates a series of child murders. The books have been compared to James Ellroy, and they sound extra-grim. (The series’ striking covers were designed by the brilliant Gregg Kulick.) Then another friend mentioned that she recently assigned a review of Peace’s new novel, Occupied City
. And then I came across Whitney Matheson’s post about a series of films produced by IFC based on the Red Riding quartet, though it’s been truncated into a cinematic trilogy. A trailer for all three movies here.
READ MORE >
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Writer Rodrigo Fresán recalls a time in his life when he was a book thief:
And one perfect winter morning, I challenged someone who at the time was a good friend and rival, another consummate book thief, to the ultimate test.
He and I stationed ourselves at one end of Avenida Corrientes, in Buenos Aires, famous for the number of bookstores located along it, bookstores that are still there, I think, though I’m writing this from so far away. And we set ourselves the goal — each of us on one side of the street, previously selected by the flip of a coin — to steal the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In the order of publication.
I ought to say that I succeeded and he didn’t, and that our friendship was never the same again.
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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
In writing the piece about Joe Palmer that went up today, I was tempted to include a lot more of his writing. As it is, the review is imbalanced in his favor, but the way I figure it, it’s better to read him than me. But I wanted to share just two other brief excerpts (of many) that didn’t make it into the final version:
“In Australia practically everybody goes to the races,” said the visitor to our shores. “And they drink. Those are the two principal pastimes.”
Well, it seemed that the Australians were well grounded in the fundamentals. With an encyclopedia to guide them they could not have picked amusements on which time had bestowed a greater accolade. The Greeks did both around the funeral pyre of Achilles. There had been instances since.
And this about someone whose job at Saratoga was to keep ducks out of a pool in front of a steeplechase jump: (continues) READ MORE >
