Dirty books, and clean
May 7, 2007 | Comments Off
Martin Konrad’s Dirty Books is a conceptual series highlighting constraints on freedom of expression.
The artist covered each book with critical quotes that greeted it upon publication, and with references to past and continuing abuses, including “burning, tearing apart, locking away, hiding.” (Via La Petite Claudine.)
In related news, last week a school board member in Illinois District 128 objected to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” because of “violent imagery,” “racial slurs,” and — my favorite part — “anti-Christian language.”
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s Weekly Events
May 7, 2007 | Comments Off
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events.
Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
MONDAY, 5.7: The Reader’s Room presents The Raw Shark Texts at Mo Pitkin’s. Highly recommended. 7PM, one drink minimum.
TUESDAY, 5.8: Lolita hosts an opening party for an exhibition of paintings — including Swim(Mo), pictured above, right — by ANNE-FRANCOISE POTTERAT, “inspired by life and lexicography in her native Lausanne as well as her experiences in the United States and Iran.” We’ll also be blessed with the sonic stylings of avant pop sensation DJ MAXX KLAXON. And cheap drinks! Details (Full disclosure as always: I put this event together just for fun). 6 – 8PM, FREE.
WEDNESDAY, 5.9: Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Series presents an evening with “Joshua Ferris, Michael Fitzgerald, Nick Bertozzi, Sheila Heti, with music from The Feverfew.” Highly recommended. 8PM, FREE.
THURSDAY, 5.10: “Upstairs at the Square” pairs singer-songwriter ROSIE THOMAS (These Friends of Mine) with French author ANNA GAVALDA (Hunting and Gathering) for an evening of performance and conversation with host KATHERINE LANPHER (Full disclosure as always: I am the PR consultant for this project). 7PM, FREE.
FRIDAY, 5.11: In limited engagement at Village East Cinema, “the NYC theatrical premiere of Guy Maddin’s new film, BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!, to be presented as a live spectacle with live orchestra, foley artists, castrato & celebrity narrators including Crispin Glover, Poet Laureate John Ashberry, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Isabella Rossellini, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, etc., etc.”
SATURDAY, 5.12: At the Jewish Museum, The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend: ‘Louise Nevelson constructed her sculpture much as she constructed her past: shaping each with her legendary sense of self as she created an extraordinary iconography through abstract means…The sculpture for which she is best known was made of cast-off wood parts – actual street throwaways – transformed with monochromatic spray paint. Through her elegant room-size works, Nevelson regularly summoned themes linked to her complicated past, fractious present, and anticipated future… The exhibition will be the first major American museum survey of Nevelson’s work in this country in a generation.’ Through September.
SUNDAY, 5.13: “good words @ Good World, a new reading series featuring a different theme every month, continues with DRINK: MAX BLAGG, co-editor of Bald Ego, a magazine of literature and art… and DAVID LYNCH, author of Vino Italiano and The Vino Italiano Buying Guide… He is General Manager of Babbo Ristorante.” 5PM, FREE.
Happy weekend from the absent father
May 4, 2007 | Comments Off
Zone Johnston, my granny’s father, was always dragging his wife and kids to carpentry jobs throughout Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and beyond, and then abandoning them in favor of a new pretty face. According to my mom, “[his wife's] people would have to come to where they were and take them home until Zone finished his work and wandered back to find them.”
Maybe Zone mailed this postcard (above) from the scenic Imperial Sugar Co. offices to his younger daughter, Louise, while he was away gallivanting. The message reads:
Hello Louise when are you coming to see Dady? tell Mama to write to me very soon. when have you seen Pa Johnston. write me a little letter/from Dad
If it was sent in 1913 — and I think it was, but someone has enhanced the date by hand — Louise would have been five or six years old. Less than three decades later she died in the state mental hospital.
Gratuitous 1913 trivia: The world’s first crossword puzzle was published in The New York World in December of that year.
Revolution to republic in prints and drawings
May 4, 2007 | Comments Off
The New York Public Library’s “From Revolution to Republic in Prints and Drawings” exhibition runs through July 7.
There you can see “An Exact View of the Late Battle of Charlestown, June 17, 1775,” contemplate “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street” (above), enjoy the political cartoons of the day, and gaze at portraits of men in wigs.
Russell Banks on Colin Channer’s moral fable
May 3, 2007 | Comments Off
Colin Channer’s The Girl With the Golden Shoes centers on a girl who becomes an object of suspicion and gets kicked out of her fishing village after teaching herself to read. “She’d not been led to reading by a great ambition — that was something reading had produced. But this wasn’t easy to explain.”
Setting out for the city with a bar of soap, a change of clothes, and 50 pounds and 50 pence, 15-year-old Estrella is determined to buy a pair of shoes, get a job, and someday travel to Europe, a place she’s learned about from books. Temptations arise, mostly in the form of sweet-talking men, but she stays focused.
This is not Channer’s first powerful female protagonist. Geoffrey Philp observed in an interview last year that he excels at creating them. “What’s wrong with you?” Philp joked.
“I don’t make a real distinction between [male and female characters],” Channer said. “For me it comes down to this, an interesting person who wants an interesting thing for an interesting reason. Weak women are not interesting so they’re not worth placing at the center of a narrative.”
In an afterward reproduced with permission below, Russell Banks accurately paints The Girl with the Golden Shoes as a “nearly perfect moral fable.” You can read an excerpt from the novella here.
We don’t see it attempted much these days, perhaps because American writers (and readers) are so blindered by standard-issue realism on the one side and escapist fantasy on the other, but Colin Channer’s The Girl with the Golden Shoes is a nearly perfect moral fable. It’s an ancient, essentially European literary form, the moral fable; but think of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Think of Faulkner’s The Bear or Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Those are the modern American classics in the form. A more recent example is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like them, The Girl with the Golden Shoes is a short narrative, shorter than a conventionally realistic novel, that is, but not so short as to be confused with a mere story. Like them, it’s set more or less outside of present time, yet is not meant to be read as historical fiction, and happens in a place that’s slightly outside the known or at least the familiar world. Even the title, The Girl with the Golden Shoes, calls to mind those old fables and fairy tales, pre-Christian European folk tales and medieval romances.
The protagonist is individualized, yes, a recognizable Afro-Caribbean country girl of the early 1940s born and raised on a recognizable Caribbean island that’s a little like Cuba, a little like Jamaica, and a little like Hispaniola or Trinidad, yet none of the above. She’s a spunky, intelligent girl named Estrella — ah, yes, the star — poised at the exact end of childhood and the exact beginning of adulthood. But she’s from a world that does not recognize adolescence; that is to say, a world way older than ours, in which there are children and there are adults and nothing in between; and thus, of necessity, she seems flattened somewhat, a pre-modern “type” — or better yet, an archetype. Estrella is the archetype of the innocent provincial youth who one day sets out for the big city, here called Seville, to find her fortune and her fate. To become somebody. It’s usually a boy on this journey, rarely a girl, but Channer knows that archetypes are gender-blind. And given his tripartite theme of dependency, trust, and betrayal (about which, more later), it’s a more intriguing tale morally if it’s a girl. She’s adopted, sort of, raised by her grandparents, which is to say she’s a child without real parents, a foundling without a binding self-defining family, making it necessary for her to locate her true identity outside the family, to find it even, as is typical, outside the community she’s been raised in. For the community has cast her out. The reason being — again, typically — she’s the solitary bearer of a curse, the unintentional cause of widespread, otherwise inexplicable suffering in her village. This makes her an exile, a wanderer who can’t go home again. Read more
Are book reviewers out of print?
May 2, 2007 | Comments Off
Motoko Rich very kindly mentions this site — and a number of other blogs, including TEV, Bookslut, and Syntax of Things — in her New York Times article on the unfortunate disappearance of newspaper book reviews like the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s.
Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions like, say, Mark Twain in a way that a newspaper book review could not, unless there was a current book on the subject. But she would never consider what she does a replacement for more traditional book reviews.“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think that people are doing very, very different things.”
For some perspective on these remarks, I refer you to the closest thing to a mission statement this site has ever had: A dictatorship, not a democracy (posted in December, 2003).
Also, I participated last year in “Critical Edge,” a blog-versus-print discussion at Arts Journal. There Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis leapt in with the sneering enjoinder to blog on, little honeybees, blog on — we have, thanks! — and cast writers’ willingness “to work for nothing or next to it” as a quasi-unethical act.
My response: Thoughts from a “little honeybee.” And before that: Venue, or voice?
Image credit: Berenice Abbott’s News Stand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, November 1935 was taken from the NYPL’s Changing New York collection.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
April 30, 2007 | Comments Off
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
Per usual the city is calling my name, but the teeming metropolis of my dreams isn’t New York this week. To wit, the LA-LA-LA-LONDON edition for your enjoyment:
MONDAY, 4.30: At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, “A discussion between David Dawson and Christine Binnie of the Neo-Naturists… whose work features in The Secret Public. The group had the structure of an open network and performances during the 1980s were presented not only in galleries but in night clubs as cabaret and public spaces.” 7PM.
TUESDAY, 5.1: “Central Saint Martins and The Look present: CLASH CULTURE: A NIGHT OF TREASON. Paul Gorman, Michon & Kolowska and special guests. Central Saint Martins celebrates the most visually exciting rock ‘n’ roll band of all time THE CLASH, with contributions from key collaborators, plus special guests.” 7PM, FREE.
WEDNESDAY, 5.2: “Focusing on key moments in art, sculpture, architecture and philosophy in relation to body measures, and on the development of scientific thought that led to the metric system, Robert Tavernor in his inaugural lecture will look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he will set measures and measuring in cultural context to show how deeply they are connected to human experience and history. Robert Tavernor is professor of architecture and urban design, and director of the Cities Programme at LSE. His book, Smoot’s Ear, will be published in May 2007.” 6:30PM, FREE.
THURSDAY, 5.3: Retail therapy: Topshop, the London Review of Books bookshop, and the no longer bricks and mortar (how will I know for sure if I’m getting advice from left-handed staffers if I order online?) “Anything Left-Handed” shop.
FRIDAY, 5.4: Literary pub crawls are always an excellent idea (in New York, both Lolita and Verlaine do a blissfully cheap happy hour, and the exotic house cocktails at Les Enfants Terribles are divine).
SATURDAY, 5.5: That darling boy from Harry Potter is trying to establish his credentials as a serious actor the old-fashioned way, by working blue, bless his heart. The reviews are mixed on Equus but it’s good fodder for cocktail party chatter.
SUNDAY, 5.6: Penguin UK did this “My Penguin” thing where readers can design their own cover. I attempted to have a go conceptually with Dorian Grey and a few ripped out pages from my fave glossies, but never got it right. It wouldn’t have been as good as this one, anyway. Sunday’s toss-up: re-imagine a book cover, or mount a protest against the use of joylessly quotidian stock photos and slapped together fonts that everyone has seen on a menu already. Don’t cut corners on the sign, though.
On the radar aka “What I’m dying to do for my birthday”: The Puppini Sisters at the Algonquin’s Oak Room in New York next month…Heathcliff, don’t you know that it’s me, it’s Cathy… (from “Wuthering Heights“).
P.S., genius: BritLitBlogs.com.
Warming his hands in the bone-picking room
April 30, 2007 | Comments Off
Reading Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium,” written after a visit to Japan for her grandmother’s funeral, feels like eavesdropping on the deepest and most spellbinding of secrets.
My cousin Takahagi, a Buddhist priest, does not want me to go to the crematorium. It is not a place for visitors. When I press him, he explains: the crematorium is a gateway to the next world and is potentially dangerous. In Japan, cremation is avoided on certain days of the week, known as tomobiki, or “friend-pulling” days. If you cremate a body on tomobiki, the soul that is finally and forcibly removed from the flesh might snatch along a family member or friend for company.Despite the impression you might have from certain Hollywood films, most Buddhist priests do not contentedly live on remote mountaintops waiting to dispense spiritual advice to depressed sons of millionaires who secretly long to be superheroes. The priests I know are busy with paperwork, scheduling, and appointments. Their job is to oversee everything related to death and rebirth, which, in Japan, is an elaborate, continuous, and expensive process.
I know something about temples and priests because my Japanese family owns a Buddhist temple, which my great-grandfather took over in the late nineteenth century. Our temple is part of the Sōtō sect, which Americans know of as Zen. My grandfather, once slated to inherit the complex, rebelled, leaving the temple in the hands of his sister, whose son has run it successfully for the past thirty years. Now his 25-year-old son, Takahagi (technically my second cousin, but to simplify things, I’ll refer to him as my cousin), is poised to continue the family tradition.
Takahagi has come to pick me up from Iwaki train station, which is located north of Tokyo and not far from Sendai city. He cuts an elegant figure on the other side of the exit gate with his black fedora, black narrow ankle jeans, and gossamer black T-shirt bearing a print of a skull. . . .
I can’t help but wonder if Takahagi’s early and constant exposure to death hasn’t colored his sensibilities in some way. His older brother has become that Japanese social pariah, the otaku, who hides away in his room playing video games and conversing with characters in comic books. As the oldest son, my otaku cousin was supposed to take over the temple, but his extreme antisocial behavior makes this transition unlikely. . . .
When we reach the temple, where his parents live and the rest of the family is waiting, Takahagi slips into a side room and changes into his official “casual priest clothing,” which looks like a pair of pajamas with elastic around the wrists and ankles. Outfits like these are ordered from a Buddhist catalogue that sells, among other things, incense, new sutras, and gongs.
I’ve been visiting the temple over many years, but this trip is significant because I have come for my grandmother’s funeral. . . .
Photos, with explanations, are up at Marie’s site.
Happy weekend from the house moving professionals
April 27, 2007 | Comments Off
My great-great-grandfather, Allen Alexander Johnston*, was born in Kentucky in 1854. He moved to Dallas before the turn of the century and founded A.A. Johnston Contracting & House Moving sometime prior to his death in 1916.
Many early house-moving platforms of the kind depicted in his ad were pulled by teams of horses. How Johnston powered his rig I don’t know, but it looks to have been manned by bank robbers. (Would you trust those guys with your house, safe, or boiler?)
For the best in home relocation (and construction) folly, watch Buster Keaton’s One Week.
* Pictured here, far left, next to his wife, the not-so-grandmotherly “Mammy”
When the work’s not going well
April 27, 2007 | Comments Off
Stephen Elliott kicked his “addiction to continual bursts of small information” by spending a month offline. In the current Poets & Writers, he’s got some suggestions for those of us who pass whole days cruising the so-called information superhighway in search of our next fix.
Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity. As long as you read your e-mail and respond once every twenty-four hours, nobody is likely to notice. Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive. If the main thing I was doing in my life was writing a novel, I would resolve not to be online at all. I know people who have moved “off the grid,” to rural areas to escape any distractions to their work. But the reality is you don’t need to go anywhere, you just need a computer without a Wi-Fi hookup. The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work’s not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work’s not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.
(Thanks to Marlon James for the pointer. Image taken from Horizons Unlimited.)
Didn’t make the party? Take the quiz.
April 27, 2007 | Comments Off
Thanks to everyone who came out to the When I Was a Loser party last night, and especially to those who shushed the throng of investment bankers until they were shamed into relocating their networking/backrub party outside the reading zone.
Kelly Braffet and Owen King dug out plaid shirts, concert tees, and baggy pants from high school, while I wore an ’80s gold-lamé-with-black-flowers prom dress that I bought at a Goodwill on Miami Beach four years ago. It looks every penny of the three bucks I paid for it. Jim Othmer got in the spirit with a corduroy jacket. And Maxx Klaxon played everything from “How Soon Is Now?” to “No Action,” “Tom Sawyer,” and “Loser.”
A gentleman named Norm won the trivia quiz, which I assembled Wednesday night with a little help from some friends. (By the way, Jessa, nobody got the Reznor/Amos question right. Well done.)
With 17 correct answers, he won four DVDs: This is Spinal Tap, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Wet Hot American Summer, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. How would you have done?
1. How many sides are on the D&D die with the largest number of sides?
A. 5
B. 7
C. 10
D. 20
2. What became Chuck Woolery’s trademark commercial break gesture on Love Connection?
A. The two minutes, two seconds sign
B. A “V” for “victory”
C. Two thumbs-up
D. A high-five
3. When, in Freaks & Geeks, Lindsay’s father tells her a cautionary tale about his first sexual experience (which happened while he was serving in the armed forces), which of these lines does he say?
A. Condoms just don’t last long in that kind of heat.
B. I wish I could get that five dollars back.
C. Marching is a lot harder when you have to keep stopping to scratch yourself.
D. And remember, they didn’t have “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” then.
4. Walker Percy called which cult novel centered on a misfit protagonist a “gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy”?
A. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
B. The Sot-Weed Factor
C. A Confederacy of Dunces
D. The Catcher in the Rye
Belated notes from the tribute to Roberto Bolaño
April 26, 2007 | Comments Off
Francisco Goldman recently acknowledged that potential converts to the work of Roberto Bolaño might be turned off by the media “hype assault.”
Yet he argued, at a National Arts Club tribute to the late writer, that the praise being heaped on Bolaño originates not with newspaper editors moving in lockstep, nor with the publisher’s publicity department, but with readers themselves.
“It reminds me of what happened in Mexico,” said Goldman. “The passion is coming from the readers up.”
Bolaño fever spread across the Spanish-speaking world even more swiftly than it has overtaken the States. Less than a year before his reputation skyrocketed at home, Bolaño meandered unmolested and unrecognized around the Paris Book Fair. He eventually approached the table devoted to Latin American literature.
“Are you interested in Latin American writers?” asked the earnest table attendant.
“You could say so,” Bolaño said. At the attendant’s suggestion he wrote down his name, which didn’t spark the slightest flicker of recognition, to receive future mailings.
This anecdote surfaced at the tribute, where The Savage Detectives was as engagingly riotous and bizarre read aloud as it is when savored — and cackled over — in private. As James Wood wrote recently:
A novel all about poetry and poets, one of whose heroes is a lightly disguised version of the author himself: how easily this could be nothing more than a precious lattice of ludic narcissism and unbearably “literary” adventures! Again, Bolaño skirts danger and then gleefully accelerates away from it. The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly, literal sensibility. His atmospheres are solidly imagined, but the tone is breezy and colloquial and amazingly unliterary.
Among the readers and speakers at the National Arts Club event was Carmen Boullosa, Bolaño’s friend who recently remembered him in The Nation. She maintains that The Savage Detectives is mere juvenilia in comparison with 2666 (the English translation doesn’t appear until next year), which she believes to be Bolaño’s finest work.
Her high opinion of the later novel was seconded over drinks after the reading by both Goldman and Jose Prieto. The liquor was flowing freely by then, so I can’t say for sure, but I believe it was Goldman who made the impassioned case that 2666 is a stronger work of postmodern fiction than anything Pynchon or DeLillo has written.
Bolaño wrote the final book in a mad rush, when he knew he was dying. There were to be five parts — the last of which was left partly unfinished — and he asked a friend to have them published in separate installments, as discrete books, so that his children could live off of the proceeds.
Ultimately, though, the friend disobeyed Bolaño’s instructions. He concluded that the power of 2666 is cumulative, and indivisible.
See also Aura Estrada’s Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic.
Kumar on post-colonial writing in a globalized world
April 25, 2007 | Comments Off
Amitava Kumar sends word that he’ll be reading from Bombay-London-New York for his “Post-Colonial Writing in a Globalized World” talk with Ilija Trojanow at the Goethe-Institut tonight.
The section he has in mind, which I read while preparing for the Branding & Freedom in the Market Economy event last month, considers representations of Ghandi. I’m posting it in context here for those who can’t make it.
Once, when I came out of the subway in New York City, I saw a sign that said “Gandhi was a great and charitable man.” Beneath, in smaller type, were the words, “However, he could have used some work on his triceps.”The sign was an advertisement for the Equinox Fitness Club. If you joined early, the sign said, you could save 150 dollars.
I confess I like the use to which Gandhi is put by the Equinox Fitness Club. No doubt the Mahatma would have found the price of the packet a bit steep. But I think he would have liked the thriftiness of the early-membership plan. Gandhi came from a family of traders. The name his family gave him – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – was translated by the writer G.V. Desani as “Action-Slave-Fascination-Moon Grocer.” What a tantalizing mix of qualities! The qualities of a man of the world! This kind of man would even have understood advertising.
Practical city living, #8
April 24, 2007 | Comments Off
Did Showtime buy up all the train ad slots normally reserved for Poetry in Motion and Dr. Zizmor? No matter which way you turn on the subway these days you’ll catch the deeply unsettling gaze of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, get an eyeful of cleavage, or both.
The proprietress of Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny relays helpful tips for the resulting Henry VIII trivia games now sweeping mass transit.
Two older gentlemen on the train were trying to figure out which of Henry VIII’s wives outlived him. The woman sitting across from me, trying to read her New Yorker, smirked to herself until it was too much. She stood up and walked towards them. “Catherine Parr.” She said. She was British. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s how you remember.” She walked, New Yorker under arm, further down the car.“Divorced…”
“Beheaded. So two were beheaded.”
“And two divorced. Which one outlived him?”
“She just told you.”
“Divorced, beheaded, died…”
“…divorced, beheaded, survived.”
The man closest to the door adjusted his pinky ring and said “Huh.”
(Anne of Cleves also outlived the king — as his sister.)
Persephone Books: rescuing forgotten novels by women
April 24, 2007 | Comments Off
The publishing arm of Persephone Books, a bookshop on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, revives novels, mostly by women, that have fallen out of print and dropped out of public consciousness. The books are bound in gray covers, with endpaper fabric in patterns dating to the year of first publication.
For Peter Fawkes, this project highlights the trouble copyright extension poses for more obscure authors.
Persephone reprints out-of-copyright books that an extension of the length of copyright would forbid. While an extension would well support content creators who are still in demand, these creators remain a tiny minority of the number of creators over the last century. If the extension was made, Persephone and other curators would be unable to save lesser known but important authors and their works from oblivion.
(Thanks, Lauren.)