Jess
I’ve been re-reading Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme and loving it even more than I did the first time. Still so full of wry humor and quirk; still so deftly navigates the margin between the absurd and the deeply emotional. I think Barthelme is one of the best at leading the reader through a fantastic, hilarious, provocative and perplexing tale only to arrive at a final sentence or paragraph that is sincerely heartbreaking. “Daumier” is a recent favorite from the collection. They’re all very short, you only need ten minutes or so. Maybe read one the next time you’re eating a Nutri-Grain bar.
Ashleigh
I’ve been reading about Judaism. Specifically, representations of it in 16th-century drama. I have nothing against 16th-century drama, or Judaism (wow, that sounds terrible), but I wouldn’t normally choose to study such topics. I read Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and it was okay; I read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and it was better. I would actually go so far as to recommend reading Merchant of Venice, if only because the structure is interesting and Portia’s feistiness is satisfying. Then when you read this New Yorker article about re-trying Shylock, it will all make sense, and you will feel smart.
David
I’ve just started Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, a book about one man’s journey to find the reclusive Tarahumara people in Mexico. These people, apparently, run for two days straight. I was first introduced to them by the book Running After Antelope by Scott Carrier, a book whose title comes from the fact that humans are the greatest endurance runners of any animal. The Tarahumara will hunt antelope by simply chasing them to exhaustion. No guns. No arrows. After days and days of simply running, the animal just falls down. As long as a human can keep an animal in sight, it can run it down. That’s crazy.
Over at Flavorwire, they’ve compiled a list of 30 great opening lines in literature. Here are a few that I wish were on the list. What I like about these, in addition to their aesthetic qualities, is that they are perfect distillations of the books they begin.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory Read More »
In “Why the Yorkshire Ripper?,” David Peace provides an example of how the experiences of writers’ lives carry over into their work. Peace spent the 1970s and early 1980s, the years of his youth, in Northern England. “This was a time and place haunted by one figure, one man—The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe,” Peace says. His observations of the “time and place” formed the basis of the setting for the four novels of his Red Riding Quartet. He summarizes some of the memories that stick with him:
I remember the first time I saw the two words ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ on the front page of a newspaper when I was ten years old. I remember the posters of the faces of the victims. I remember my sister’s prayers on a night, Please God, don’t let the Ripper kill my mummy; ten times, out loud, every night. I remember the policeman on the TV who said the Ripper was Somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. I remember the taunts in the playground, Your dad is the Ripper! No, your dad is the Ripper. I remember reading Sherlock Holmes and wanting to be Sherlock Holmes; wanting to be Sherlock Holmes so I could catch the Ripper.
To Peace, novels may be the best, most “honest” way to recount events of the past. “The most dangerous books, for me, are always the ones that boast of being the true story, whose authors claim to know the truth,” Peace says.—March 7, The Daily Beast
March 10, 2010 – 11:18 am
Librarians: it seems we have underestimated them. Stereotyped and dismissed as sorry, old book-stackers who leave the desk of the library only to saunter home to their cat and a romance novel, they turn out to be the inspiration behind a new book that gets top billing in reviews posted on sites of two major news outlets.
This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson made it into the March 7 Sunday Book Review Section of the New York Times. What Pagan Kennedy has to say about Johnson’s celebration of librarians:
In her most absorbing passages, I felt as if I were back in the children’s library, scrutinizing a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, where the entry on “pachyderm” sat near the disquisition on “pachysandra,” a kind of ground cover. Johnson’s book carries the same kind of associative magic. Rather thantaking us on a brisk, orderly march, she lets us ride on the swaying back of an elephant, glimpsing treasures glimmering through the fronds of pachysandra.
This is only a small part of Kennedy’s enthusiastic review.
In his review, NPR’s Heller McAlpin says of the book, “An overdue tribute, indeed.”
HarperCollins provides the first chapter of This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All for readers to preview.
March 10, 2010 – 11:14 am
Even though it’s been over a decade since her Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things, was published, writer Arundhati Roy’s impact on the world keeps growing thanks to her role as an activist for the powerless.
Being an activist puts you in a position where Maoist extremists might request your help to serve as a mediator to armed conflict, which is what happened to Roy recently. Roy declined to take on the role, according to a March 7 story in The Guardian, in which she is quoted as saying “she was ‘a writer, not a mediator. I don’t think I would be very good at it,’ she said. ‘It’s a serious responsibility and there are people who would be good at it.’”
However, she said in an interview with the BBC Hindi language service that “she would consider being an ‘observer,’” as reported by The Guardian.
In “Why the Maoists want Arundhati Roy,” Faisal Devji revisits the subject March 9, providing an overview of Indian politics and how the issue of celebrity figured into the choice of Roy as a potential mediator.
Oh, NPR, I love it when you try to titillate. Last night, I came home and turned on the radio (well, the live stream on iTunes, but that doesn’t have the same ring) just in time to catch this Fresh Air segment. It’s an interview with Melissa Febos, whose new memoir, Whip Smart, details her career as a professional dominatrix. While working as a dominatrix, Febos also graduated from college, started an MFA at Sarah Lawrence, and developed a drug addiction. In the last five or so years, professional sex workers have been publishing their stories in greater numbers. Read More »
InDigest’s monthly reading series, InDigest 1207, is tonight at (le) Poisson Rouge with poets Matt Hart and Nate Pritts. Dustin will be down there with Jess hosting the reading, and there will be a lot of poetry that is better than a blog post.
Example: “Do you remember / the first person who broke your heart? / Well, s/he’s back, and like always making tea / in your closet, singing cross-sections of birds, / cutting the tag off your mattress.”
(from Matt Hart’s “Self-Helper”, from Who’s Who Vivid)
by Ted Kooser, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Wisconsin writer Freya Manfred is not only a fine poet but the daughter of the late Frederick Manfred, a distinguished novelist of the American west. Here is a lovely snapshot of her father, whom I cherished among my good friends.
Green Pear Tree in September
On a hill overlooking the Rock River
my father’s pear tree shimmers,
in perfect peace,
covered with hundreds of ripe pears
with pert tops, plump bottoms,
Read More »
Books:
Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema
by Peter Cowie [Rizzoli]
+ 2010 is seeing its share of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, with his 100th birthday being celebrated all over the world. Recent tribute screenings at Film Forum and the Kurosawa 100 Years box set released by Criterion (containing 4 films never before available in the US, including his debut film Sanshiro Sugata) are all part of the build up over the course of the year which will feature many, many tributes to the director and his contributions to the art of film. Peter Cowie’s book seems a fitting addition to the fervor of the year. Cowie, a frequent contributor to Criterion Collection liner notes and former international director of Variety, has created a long book that is full of still frames analyzing what what Kurosawa so great, along with Cowie dissecting the paths that lead to the grand oveure of samurai films, dark, introspective post-war film, the late epics in his career, and the anomolies like his Russian opus Dersu Uzala. The book also includes annotated script pages, written by the director himself, and many of Kurosawa’s paintings and drawings which became a lynch pin of the development process for a number of his films including the epics he made late in his career such as Ran and Kagemusha.
Other Notable Releases:The Book of Firsts by Peter D’Epiro [Anchor], Burning Bright by Ron Rash [Ecco], The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club by Maeve Binchy [Anchor], So Much for That by Lionel Shriver [Harper], The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee [Riverhead], The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia de Luce Mystery by C. Alan Bradley [Delcorte], A Week in December by Sebastien Faulks [Doubleday]
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