What Do You Think?
People on the street react to the 9/11 report. Laurie Fredette, Ticket Taker: “I read the whole report cover to cover. Turns out it was terrorists.”
Plant Food for Thought
Nathalie Chicha responds to Russell Smith’s Globe and Mail article lamenting all the precise naming of plants in Canadian Literature. He thinks it’s “showing off.” Nathalie says:
The question is, why show off with that? “Showing off” is not a simple impulse, to which other things can be reduced; good analysis would realize how culturally mediated [...]
Web Fiction and A Couple of Digressions
CAAF gives us the heads-up on this Slate article about Clubbo.com, “a just-launched site for a faux indie record label” that “demonstrates that it is possible to weave a story out of hyperlinks.” The article posits this most obvious and excellent question:
Why hasn’t anyone figured out how to use the Web to tell [...]
Living Dolls
In this web-only Paris Review interview, Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla says:
In London I ran into a wonderful book by a young writer, Gaby Wood — the daughter of the critic James Wood. It’s called Living Dolls, and it has very good research on automata and a chapter dedicated to Edison’s project for a talking toy. [...]
Checking the Legality of Checkpoint
The Christian Science Monitor wonders whether Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint: A Novel is illegal.
Note the careful language used by the publisher on the Amazon site:
Checkpoint is a work of fiction by acclaimed author Nicholson Baker, a novella that explores the peculiar angst many Americans are feeling right now about their country and their president. [...]
“If the 9/11 report had been written as a novel, nobody would believe it.”
David Ignatius recommends reading the 9/11 Report as a thriller:
Try to read the story as a narrative, a nonfiction thriller in which the characters move inexorably toward the cataclysm of that cloudless morning. The strength of the report is precisely in its narrative power; by telling all the little stories, it reveals the big story [...]
Amazon.co.uk Refuses to Stock Controversial Book
Amazon.co.uk will not carry Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud. The book, according to the Guardian, “inspired some of the more sensational allegations in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.” Martin Rynja, the publisher, says the company is afraid of being sued.
I Feel Like Taking In A Narrative
The lovely Rose Gowen sent me this passage from Gary Indiana’s piece on Jean Echenoz in the current issue of Bookforum:
If it’s true that photography released painting from naturalism, Echenoz prompts the hardly new thought that film has, or ought to have, liberated the novel from it’s more plodding expository chores. While his technique mimics [...]
What’s With the Bird-Headed Dwarfs?
The Times has a whole page of Annie Dillard links. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of For the Time Being:
I have in my hands the standard manual of human birth defects. Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, fourth edition, by Kenneth Lyons Jones, M.D., professor of pediatrics at UC-San Diego, 1988, [...]
Does It Ork?
I’ve been rereading some of Annie Dillard’s stuff these past couple of weeks. Looking for some interesting Dillard links to share with you, I happened upon this passage in an old New York Times review of Living By Fiction:
Now there are readers and writers whose minds can handle critical theory and esthetic abstractions. All honor [...]
The New Guy With A Dream
Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance will be reissued at the end of August. If they want a bestseller, they should release an audio version with Obama doing the reading. I had Emily Dickinson shivers during the whole second half of his speech — and I’m a [...]
Back Monday, probably
I’m traveling to Nashville this weekend to visit my grandparents and my aunt, uncle and cousins.
Long-time readers may recall that my grandparents used to live in Mississippi. Due to Grandma’s failing health and Grandpa’s memory loss, they’ve relocated to an assisted living facility near my aunt’s house.
Since then Grandpa [...]
Los Angeles coffee shop culture revealed
Kevin may not get as much writing done in L.A. coffee shops as he did in their Brooklyn counterparts, but he does get to see “thin, young, blonde, spikey-haired” girls with doe eyes try to sell nude self-portraits to visibly aroused patrons:
“I think they’re fantastic,” another man, a middle-aged would-be screen writer I’d seen there [...]
Karoo by Steve Tesich
Please note that this book reaction was written by Shauna McKenna (editor of Moonshinestill).
I recently heard that the word “interesting” no longer means anything. I would venture the same about the word “important.” But there it is, still in our lexicon, and I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to reach back to [...]
Bloggers: less useful than Aunt Jessie, possibly equals of Star Trek convention-goers
CBS columnist John C. Dvorak characterizes bloggers’ coverage of the Democratic National Convention as “an undecipherable mess” — also, “laughable,” “self-congratulatory,” “vapid” and “ludicrous.”
“Aunt Jessie gossiping with friends in the Nebraska delegation should be doing the blog. That way there is a long shot chance that something interesting will come out of it,” he says. [...]