With the World Cup coming soon, The New York Times offers up some wise football/soccer-related books to read.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Your Goal? Read Good Soccer Books
With the World Cup coming soon, The New York Times offers up some wise football/soccer-related books to read.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Sylvia Beach: Her Pioneering Spirit
Sylvia Beach’s shop in Paris offered bed and board, and books. With $3,000 and a passion for books, she made literary history. The Telegraph has more.
From the story...
Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company had barely been open two years when she decided to publish Ulysses.
“Nine stenographers gave up the typing ... and a gentleman from the British Embassy burned a dozen pages in a rage,” she wrote in a letter in 1921. “Ulysses is a masterpiece and one day will rank among the classics of English literature . . . Joyce is in Paris and I told him I would publish his book after the publishers in New York threw up the job in a fright.”
Beach was in her early thirties, and had settled in Paris in the days when a small amount of money and a lot of hard work went a long way. Her French lover, Adrienne Monnier, ran a French-language bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, but Sylvia wanted an English-language shop, and soon the two of them had premises opposite each other in the Rue de l’Odéon.
Everybody came: Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, André Gide, William Carlos Williams. They didn’t come sometimes, they came often, using the shop as a meeting place, a reading room, an accommodation agency, a think tank and a bank.
Bad Writing: What Is It Good For?
That's the question Salon recently asked.
From the piece...
Sadly, if bad writers have one thing in common it's that they're all firmly convinced that they're good writers. Really good writers. So it's not as self-flagellating as it might at first appear for Steve Almond to devote a monthly column at the Rumpus to publishing the bad poetry of his early years and recounting how it came to be perpetrated. If he were a truly bad writer, Almond wouldn't be harshing on his own juvenilia, right? And he certainly wouldn't be so funny about it.
A particularly memorable Almond lyric, "Sartre, You're an Asshole," features the line "I've met old teabags with more hope than you." "I don't need to tell you that I'd never read any Sartre," Almond adds after explaining the genesis of this poem in a spasm of thwarted grad-school love. Steve Almond's Bad Poetry Corner also takes reader submissions, so by all means, pitch in.
Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with "Bad Writing," a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don't necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful. But was Lott able to spin the straw of poems like "Sketches of Despair" into the gold of a nifty short film featuring interviews with the likes of George Saunders and Margaret Atwood? Hard to say, as "Bad Writing" has yet to find distribution.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
The Adjustment Bureau
There's a new movie coming soon starring Matt Damon. It's based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. The trailer has just been released.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
No Horror at Columbia University Over Donation
Good news for Columbia University. They just received a huge donation of Edward Gorey materials, more than 700 items, including nearly every edition of every work published by Gorey, to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Also part of this amazing gift are numerous original drawings, magazine illustrations, etchings, posters, dust jackets, and ephemera produced by Gorey during his prolific, nearly fifty-year career in publishing.
I have a Gorey collection, myself, though not nearly as large as the one just donated to Columbia. My prize would be a book he inscribed to me, The Headless Bust. My favorite story of Mr. Gorey would be this one - The Beastly Baby.
Friday, May 14, 2010
There is a Comic Book Out There for Everyone
So believes comic book store owners. Those owners are feeling pretty good, lately. They're doing pretty well, considering the internet and the rest.
From a piece in the Tacoma News-Tribune...
I speak of the old-fashioned comic-book shop, a vestige of Norman Rockwell America that has somehow managed to hang on and even flourish into the 21st century. Like most retail operations, comic-book shops have had their share of troubles over the past decade: According to a recent article in Business Week, there are now 3,000 shops operating in America, compared with the 10,000 that thrived in the 1990s.
But the ones that have lasted are proving more valuable now than ever. The owners of these places have managed to do something beautifully anachronistic in the iPad era: They're building actual physical communities, not virtual ones.
Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts
Anna Karenina meet Britney Spears. Jay Gatsby meet Puffy Daddy. Mr. Darcy say hello to George Clooney. More, at Flavorwire.
Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis, the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, talks shop with Vice Magazine.
From the piece...
But is there an emotional satisfaction sometimes? Do you ever feel excitement when you’re writing or is it all very technical?
No, it’s both. It’s technical and it’s emotional. I would say it’s much more emotional during the outline days of the process. The outline, in my case, is usually longer than the finished book. Tons of notes, a lot of ideas, a lot of them discarded. And then once that outline is pretty much completed, then it does become a technical process where you’re following the outline and you’re trying to organize it in a way that is pleasing to you in novel form. And so yeah, it is emotionally satisfying.
It must be. The final passages in both Imperial Bedrooms and Lunar Park pack a lot of emotional impact. They’re moving. Especially the end of Imperial Bedrooms, where Clay is talking about how he never liked anyone and how he’s afraid of people. And then there are these things that are embedded, like he talks about “moving the game as you play,” which is a callback to the quote from the band X that opens Less Than Zero, so there’s this full-circle thing happening too.
Right. It’s planned, you know. I mean, you kind of know the ending before you begin actually writing the book. Usually I know the last line of the book before I begin that technical process of going through the outline.
That’s interesting.
Yeah, I usually know the first line and the last line of the book before I begin it.
Do you really belabor what to lose and what to keep as you’re going from the outline to the novel?
Well, some people would say I throw in everything. [laughs] Some people complain, “Why is Glamorama 700 pages long?” But one of the things that I’m really interested in is the narrator. I’m interested in the function of the narrator, the person telling the story. I’ve never written a novel in the third person. My work is just a series of narrators, and I kind of give the books over to them.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Tyra Banks - Novelist
For reals. The model is going to write Modellland, a fantastical place inhabited by "Intoxibellas" who are beautiful, fierce and may have superpowers.
This Land is Our Land
Does poetry matter anymore? Does it make any difference? David Biespiel, for the Poetry Foundation, says as go America's poets, so goes American democracy.
From the piece...
America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life.
This divide between poet and civic life is bad for American poetry and bad for America, too.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Dark Side of Dickens
In the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens profiles someone who was one of the best of writers and one of the worst of men.
From the piece...
If valid, this analysis would also go some distance to explain the very severe constraints on Dickens’s legendary compassion. This is the man who had a poor woman arrested for using filthy language in the street; who essentially recast his friend Thomas Carlyle’s pessimistic version of the French Revolution in fictional form in A Tale of Two Cities (Slater is especially good on this); who dreaded the mob more than he disliked the Gradgrinds. It would also account for his weakest and most contrived novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, and its companion nonfiction compilation, American Notes. Genuine radicals and reformers in mid-19th-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second.
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