Earlier this year, Agni published my friend Marie Mockett’s fascinating Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, one of the most elegant personal essays I read in 2007. (Photos at her own site supplement the story.) Mockett is hard at work on a novel, but sometimes I lure her away from her desk to join me for meals. Fluent in Japanese, she . . .
I don’t measure fiction by the same aesthetic metrics as James Wood, but I read him, even when his judgments rankle. Any impassioned Wood critique is far superior to a hundred courteous hand-clappings. It’s especially interesting to see Wood building, in the latest New Yorker, on the grudgingly admiring essay about J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (“a very good novel, almost too . . .
Art depicting four Biblical events as if captured on Google Earth highlights their awesomeness and improbability. (Via.)
What’s Not to Love?, based on Jonathan Ames’ memoir, will air on Showtime this week.
BBC Radio 1 has cut “slut” and “faggot” from the Pogues’ Xmas tune, “Fairytale of New York.”