Thursday, July 29th, 2010

What They’re Buying

On its Twitter feed, the London Review called this site “oddly mesmerizing,” and I couldn’t agree more.
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Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Best Magazine Articles Ever

Here is a continually updated list of the best magazine articles ever written. It’s already getting a bit unwieldy, with more and more suggestions of things that haven’t exactly passed the test of time, but it’s still a great browsing tool. I was happy to see that someone had submitted Edwin Dobb’s “A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Even if the Sex is Postmodern and the Romance Problematic),” from the February 1996 issue of Harper’s. I remember liking that a lot when it was first published. I’ll have to re-read and see how it holds up.

Then there’s Gary Wolf’s 1995 profile of Ted Nelson for Wired. Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, was working on a massive project called Xanadu. The piece begins:

I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson—hypertext guru and design genius—took a scary left turn through the impolite traffic on Marin Boulevard in Sausalito. Nelson’s left hand was on the wheel, his right rested casually on the back of the front seat. He arched his neck and looked in my direction so as to be clearly heard. “I’ve been compiling a catalog of driving maneuvers,” he said. “It’s one of my unfinished projects.” (continues after the jump) READ MORE >

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Booker Field Down to 13

The 13 longlist finalists for this year’s Booker Prize have been announced. Three of them have been reviewed on The Second Pass (links where appropriate in the list below), and two others have already been assigned for review this fall, when the books are published in the U.S.

I would put my money on Andrea Levy.

The list:

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
C by Tom McCarthy
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
February by Lisa Moore
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Trespass by Rose Tremain
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
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Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The Beat

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Rick Moody’s kitschy latest is built around a 600-page sci-fi novel within a novel. Sam Sacks shakes his head: “If nothing else, The Four Fingers of Death provides further evidence for the inverse relationship between literary theory and literary quality. As a ‘project’—that’s what the author calls the book in his acknowledgments—it succeeds; as a novel, it’s harebrained and largely unreadable.” . . . Colm Toibin praises Wendy Moffat’s “well-written, intelligent, and perceptive” biography of E. M. Forster, which addresses the writer’s homosexuality. “She uses the sources for our knowledge of Forster’s sexuality, including letters and diaries, without reducing the mystery and sheer individuality of Forster, without making his sexuality explain everything.” . . . David Greenberg assesses a new biography of the 28th President of the United States: “Woodrow Wilson is too authoritative and independent to be reduced to the gadfly position of contrarianism: it is a judicious, penetrating measure of the man and his achievements and it should stand as the best full biography of Wilson for many years.” . . . Jessa Crispin reviews a new co-authored book about the prehistoric roots of human sexuality: “[Though the authors] claim they are not out to make the hunter-gatherer way of life sound more ‘noble,’ that is exactly what they do. Their anthropology sections are basically cut-and-paste jobs, and they leave out any of the dark stuff. Complex social and sexual systems are reduced to a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, making every society they mention sound like a sexy utopia.” . . . Matt Zoller Seitz examines the “psychological evolution” of George Carlin, as told in two recent books about the comic.
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Monday, July 26th, 2010

“Oh god the pomposity”

I have made my low opinion of Don DeLillo’s White Noise known around here and other places, so I was particularly happy to find this post by Alex Abramovich at the London Review of Books blog. It turns out that The Strand in New York (on a short list of my favorite spots in the world) inherited many books from the recently departed experimental novelist David Markson. Abramovich details some of his finds, but also shares how he knew to browse for them:

I’d heard about the haul from Jeff Severs, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He’d heard about it from a student who’d stumbled on Markson’s copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. ‘my copy of white noise apparently used to belong to david markson (who i had to look up),’ the student had written.

he wrote some notes in the margin: a check mark by some passages, ‘no’ by other, ‘bullshit’ or ‘ugh get to the point’ by others. i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.

‘That’s amazing,’ Jeff had replied. ‘Did he write his name in the front or something? Did you buy it secondhand recently – as in, his family sold off his library?’

yeah he wrote his name inside the front cover and the cashiers at the strand said they have his whole collection. favorite comments: ‘oh god the pomposity, the bullshit!’, ‘oh i get it, it’s a sci-fi novel!’ and ‘big deal’.

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Monday, July 26th, 2010

Nuclear Bombs and iPhones

Andrew Seal expresses irritation at the Gary Shteyngart essay I linked to last week, in which Shteyngart bemoaned the effect of social media and other technology on his readerly attention span. Seal writes:

I think a number of American writers—New Yorkers, mostly—have either decided or come to some unspoken and maybe half-conscious consensus that the societal changes being brought about by social media are as encompassing and as threatening to the fundamentals of something which used to be called human nature as the threat of nuclear war was in the 1950s. [. . .] In both cases, what is being described as a threat is a putatively immersive environment—in the 1950s, the fear of nuclear war; today, the distraction of social media—which is pushing humanity (seemingly as a species, although in real terms the most threatened are the most advanced societies) toward a point of crisis where what has been driven into latency or rarity—in the 1950s, the “dignity of man” or, articulated in more practical terms, the feeling of agency and choice; today, attention, which is often articulated again in practical terms either as genuine connectedness with other people or the ability to read dense works of literature—might in fact become irrecoverably lost.

Later, he adds:

For what is Shteyngart saying, really? That he checks his iPhone too often? He says, “I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.” May I suggest that before he had an iPhone, like most readers, his mind might have wandered momentarily every “20 or 30 words”—not to an iPhone screen, of course, but to some “interior” distraction? Do iPhones and the like really produce distraction, or do they just give a single physical destination for it?

I left a comment underneath the post, but I’ve continued thinking about it and figured I would bring the issue here, in case anyone wishes to join in. On the one hand, I don’t like to pass judgment about large cultural shifts when the upshot is simply Things Used To Be Better. Partly this is because a great many things, in fact, used to be worse, and partly because I too often feel like a grumpy 86-year-old when I’m 50 years younger than that. But on the other, larger hand, I don’t think it’s just grumpiness that might cause someone to be alarmed by the potential effects of social media. There are many of those potential effects (not all of them bad, of course), but the focus for Shteyngart and Seal is attention span.

What surprises me is how quickly Seal equates interior distractions and iPhones before moving on. Shteyngart and others might sometimes overstate the peril of the human soul, but I think Seal’s post understates the nature of the shift represented by social technologies. (continues after the jump) READ MORE >