October 2011
55 posts
“Boo!”
– Three Halloween treats: Jenna Brager on Richard Sala’s The Hidden, Joe McCulloch on the joys of pre-Code horror comics,
and Jonathan Penner on the monsters in his life.
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Postmodern Prometheus
JENNA BRAGER
on Richard Sala’s The Hidden. The Hidden, page 14 © Richard Sala Richard Sala The Hidden
Fantagraphics Books, September 2011. 120 pp.
The artist Richard Sala’s work first debuted in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s comics anthology, Raw (the “comics magazine for damned intellectuals”), and he has since drawn for publications ranging from The New York Times...
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Let Us Compare Terrologies
JOE McCULLOCH
on the grisly joys of pre-Code horror comics. Image Courtesy of Fatbottom Books Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s
Edited by Greg Sadowski
Fantagraphics Books, January 2011, 2nd ed. 320 pp. The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read!
Edited by Jim Trombetta
Abrams ComicArts, November 2010. 304 pp.
It’s clear in retrospect...
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Letter from Oakland
As part of the LARB’s continuing coverage of the Occupy movement,David Lau reports from Oakland. Occupy Everything, Liberate Oakland! Late last Tuesday night, October 25th, social media feeds buzzed with the story of a two-tour Marine veteran of Iraq, Scott Olsen, struck by a police projectile fired at close range and left unconscious with a fractured skull. By Wednesday morning it was the...
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The Horror
JONATHAN PENNER
in a Halloween Eve examination of the monsters in his life. The author in a still from Amityville 1992: It’s About Time John Landis Monsters in the Movies
DK Adult, September 2011. 320 pp. Shade Rupe Dark Stars Rising: Conversations from the Outer Realms
Headpress, February 2011. 568 pp.
Got two exciting books for the “LARB Halloween Roundup” I was...
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Famous Monsters
A few additional pictures to accompany Jonathan Penner’s Halloween Eve piece on horror. On top are Penner’s first two books in the genre, Denis Gifford’s Movie Monsters and Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland # 91; the bottom is another still from the direct-to-video classic Amityville 1992: It’s About Time.
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The Worst
See below for credits The Los Angeles Review of Books has given its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of the publication of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the...
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Van Dyke Parks on "Wall Street"
Today we offer music and commentary from pop music legend (and LARB Contributing Editor) Van Dyke Parks, best known for his collaboration with the Beach Boys’s Brian Wilson on the long-delayed Smile album. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: VDP has worked as an arranger and producer for everyone from Harry Nilsson and Ry Cooder to Bonnie Raitt to Joanna Newsom, a range amply...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, October 28th: Libros Schmibros reading group hosted by Colleen Jaurretche and David Kipen exploring Reyner Bahham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies beginning at 12:00 pm. Paul La Farge reads and signs his novel Luminous Airplanes at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. ...
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Having, or Making, or Thinking About Making a...
MEGHAN DAUM
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Joan Didion © Brigitte Lacombe The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of the publication of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the...
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Kind of Blue
AMY EPHRON
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Joan Didion © Scott Laumann The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence,...
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Where the Morning Went
AMY WILENTZ
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Joan Didion © Corey Cooley The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence,...
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The Baby
SUSAN STRAIGHT
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Quintana Roo Dunne Central Park, New York, 1970 © Dominick Dunne The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of the publication of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in...
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Unleash the Poems
Dylan Thomas would have been 97 today. He’s been gone for more than half a century and still his voice sticks around, death-defying. But that’s poetry’s best point, isn’t it? Or the point of poetry at its best: going out on a wire, crashing through windows, skipping over the Grand Canyon. Not with the delusional costuming of a superhero, just a stunt man’s balls....
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The Lasting Impression
Steven Corbin Photo Source: The Elegant Variation (http://marksarvas.blogs.com) The fifth installment of our Writers on Teachers series: Mark Sarvas with a remembrance of his mentor, writing instructor, and friend, Steven Corbin. Steven Corbin was the first novelist I knew personally. (How exciting and rarefied that seemed to me at the time!) He died in 1995 at the age of 41 from AIDS-related...
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Radar LARB
Blips: Kicking off LARB’s Didion week, here’s the author herself on Teresa Schiavo: “Yet even if we had managed to convince ourselves that this case involved the right to die, a problem remained. No one even casually exposed to religious teaching believes any such right exists.” Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 reviewed by David Ulin: “Here’s an unorthodox...
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Positions of Privilege
MATTHEW SPECKTOR
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Joan Didion © Ed Wexler The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that...
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Unmentionables
MAGDALENA EDWARDS
on Norman Rush’s domestic disturbances.
(Norman Rush will read from the work in progress discussed and excerpted below and will be in conversation with Mona Simpson at the Hammer Museum in Westwood this Tuesday, the 25th, at 7:00. Details here.) Snow © Alexander Colville 1969
Norman Rush was born in San Francisco in 1933 and didn’t publish his first book, Whites,...
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Romero, Blew, Aciman, Hughes
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay The third installment of SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column.
This week, Mary Romero, Mary Clearman Blew, André Aciman, and Jonnie Hughes. Mary Romero The Maid’s Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream
NYU Press, September 2011. 288 pp.
Just as Ann Crittenden brought us deep into the economic realities of child-rearing in The Price of...
“The Occupations Continue”
–
MIKE DAVIS, “No More Bubble Gum” SESSHU FOSTER, “Occupy Los Angeles Saturday October 15” TODD GITLIN, “New York City, October 19: The Sense of a Movement” SARA MARCUS, “C-SPAN for Radicals” ED SKOOG, “Recessionary Measures in Support of...
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C-SPAN for Radicals
SARA MARCUS Sara Marcus
Monday, October 17: It is 12:30 AM on the dot. The live video feed from Zuccotti Park has just frozen, as it does from time to time. At last there is silence in my apartment, and I can begin to write.
I keep the video window open despite the interruption, but some apparently do not: The odometer at the bottom of the frame, measuring the number of real-time viewers,...
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The Signs at City Hall
All photos: C.P. Heiser
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NO MORE BUBBLE GUM
MIKE DAVIS Sorry Your World Domination is Over © Erika Rothenberg, 2008 From the “Greeting Card” series. Courtesy of the artist.
Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?
John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing),...
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NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 19: THE SENSE OF A MOVEMENT
TODD GITLIN
Occupy, Marshall Ganz asked: Is it a moment and a movement? Either way, it’s the fastest growing phenomenon on the left in decades. If we add that its thrust — not its tactics, necessarily, but its slogan “We are the 99 percent,” which was a nifty way to formulate opposition to the prevailing plutocracy — almost instantly garnered supermajority support throughout the country,...
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RECESSIONARY MEASURES IN SUPPORT OF OCCUPY SEATTLE...
ED SKOOG
Money is horrible, a bandage where
there should be a hand, and heart’s engine
runs beat to daybreak. Money
and hands call to each other like
children at a pool; like this money
gathering noon into meadow.
It rains and rains. What is sleeping,
the mayor asks and asks.
What is a structure? The mayor
is named Mayor Mike McGinn
and he has made mistakes, asking
the people in...
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OCCUPY LOS ANGELES SATURDAY OCTOBER 15
SESSHU FOSTER
Saturday, that perfect day — an intersection downtown as a crowd spilled down Fourth Street streaming toward me on the corner at Broadway, for the first time ever, I snapped a photo with my cell phone — OPTIONS: EMAIL. This image of all these people, this surging crowd, blew away in the air like a calendar leaf into the cyber-nothing slipstream of microwave ether, the...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, October 21st: Join Wanda Coleman for an evening of music, poetry, and songs featuring musician David Zasloff, poets Bill Mohr, Cecilia Woloch, Pam Ward, and Austin Straus at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:30 pm. Michael Ondaatje discusses and signs The Cat’s Table at Vroman’s Bookstore...
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Looking Promiscuously
BRIAN SHOLIS
on Bruce Hainley’s experimental art criticism. Untitled © Vincent Fecteau 2010 Bruce Hainley Pep Talk 5: Bruce Hainley
Pep Talk, June 2011. 111 pp.
I became aware of Bruce Hainley’s writing on art a little more than a decade ago, while I was in college. Amid the monotony of a magazine’s review section, coming across his description of an exhibition by Ingrid Calame at Karyn...
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The Apocalyptic Tradition
MIKEL DUNHAM
on Roberto Bolaño, the consummate literary exile. Roberto Bolano © Mathieu Bourgois courtesy of New Directions Publishing Roberto Bolaño Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
New Directions, May 2011. 352 pp.
Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses, his latest book to be translated into English, is a collection of essays, speeches, and nonfiction...
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Japan’s Magic Hour: The Yokohama Triennale 2011
With the massive collaborative project “Pacific Standard Time” just getting underway here in L.A., LARB Art Section Editor Sharon Mizota reports back from Japan, where Yokohama’s multi-institutional exhibition “Our Magic Hour: How Much of the World Can We Know?” wraps up on November 7th. Ishida Tetsuya, “Rooftop Refugee,” 1996 In her 2002 autobiography, available for the first time in...
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Falling Down
TOD GOLDBERG
on the long-awaited arrival of the great Angeleno novel. Arcadia (Empty Pool) © Allison Maletz Héctor Tobar The Barbarian Nurseries
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2011. 422 pp.
Whenever the question comes up as to why there hasn’t been a quintessential novel about Los Angeles, the notion that the place is just too diffuse is bandied about, as if writers are incapable of...
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Holding Space: A Response to Jasper Bernes, Joshua...
Cops and a Cube cc Spencer McCormick By Jeremy Kessler In “Percentages, Politics, and the Police,” published last Saturday on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan offer a critique of my n+1 piece, “The Police and the 99 Percent.” It is an honor to engage with writers and activists of their caliber, and I thank the Los Angeles Review of Books...
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Say Hello to LARB ePubs
We’re very excited about LARB ePubs launching today — available for download at Amazon.com or the LARB Online Store, and featuring book reviews and cultural essays from our archive. They are compatible with the Kindle, iPad and other eReader devices. Issue 1 of LARB ePubs includes: David Shields on the line between life and art. Ben Ehrenreich on “the death of the book.” Geoff Nicholson on...
Our First E-Pub: Joshua Clover, Ben Ehrenreich,... →
We’re happy and proud to offer our first compilation — click anywhere on this post.
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The Great Shock
BRIAN COLLINS
on Yanis Varoufakis’s new theory of the global financial crisis. We Need A Revolution © Dan Tague Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas Theocaraki Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World
Routledge, July 2011. 552 pp. Yanis Varoufakis The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy...
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More on the Occupations
Photo: Chris Daley Today on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, we feature essays on Occupy L.A. and the nationwide Occupy movement by Ben Ehrenreich and Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan. For more from Clover and an open letter re: Occupy L.A. (and much else besides), see the Occupy Everything website. For Jeremy Kessler’s “The Police and the 99 Percent,”...
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Welcome to the Occupations
BEN EHRENREICH on Occupy Los Angeles
and JASPER BERNES, JOSHUA CLOVER, and ANNIE McCLANAHAN on percentages, politics, and the police. Woman Detained cc Paul Weiskel BEN EHRENREICH Uprising
They are occupying Riverside! They’re occupying Oakland and Omaha and Iowa City and Sacramento and Denver and Miami and Kalamazoo and and Hartford and Philadelphia and Buffalo and Austin and San...
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Out of the Past
NEAL POLLACK on a 23-volume RICHARD STARK reprint series
and JOHN SHANNON on the greatest Vietnam War novel ever written. Smith Corona cc Haris Awang Richard Stark The Hunter (1962) The Man with the Getaway Face (1963) The Outfit (1963) Deadly Edge (1971) Slayground (1971) Butcher’s Moon (1974) Comeback (1997) Firebreak (2001)
And 15 other titles. Reprints University of Chicago...
LARB Recommends
Image by Tim Biskup. Event on Friday, Oct. 14th Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, October 13th: Jeffrey Eugenides reads and signs his novel The Marriage Plot at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. Friday, October 14th: Opening reception for Tim Biskup’s new exhibit Former State at THIS los angeles beginning at...
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Both Coasts
ED SKOOG on California poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Metropole
and ADAM J. FITZGERALD talks to O’Brien about his work. Metropole (Jazz Café) Anonymous ED SKOOG Geoffrey G. O’Brien Metropole
University of California Press, March 2011. 112 pp.
Seen from a bird’s-eye view on Google Maps, the Bohemian Grove (20601 Bohemian Ave., Monte Rio, Sonoma, California 95462 — you can...
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The Country and the City
KATE MERKEL-HESS on two new histories of rural China
and MAURA ELIZABETH CUNNINGHAM on Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions Empty Stools of Rural Village Life in China (Xinhua) from All-China Women’s Federation http://bit.ly/nF7Ack
KATE MERKEL-HESS Gail Hershatter The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
University of California Press, August 2011. 472 pp. Jacob...
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The Marathon Writer
Photo copyright Dixie Sheridan Dixiesheridan.com The fourth installment of our Writers on Teachers series: Los Angeles Review of Books contributing editor Rita Williams with an appreciation of her mentor, Alison Leslie Gold. When I first heard of Alison Leslie Gold in the late eighties, I had no idea what a visionary author she was, or how much she would teach me about the writing life. I knew...
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Twilight of the Boosters
MEGAN ABBOTT
on Tom Perrotta’s post-millennial suburban humanism. American Cannibal © Blaine Fontana
Tom Perrotta The Leftovers
St. Martin’s Press, August 2011. 368 pp.
When Tom Perrotta was in the third grade, he wrote a short composition from the perspective of the Apollo 13 astronauts. “My essay,” he recalled, in an interview for Post Road magazine, “called for optimism and...
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Radar LARB
Recent Blips: ”A Year of Reading Differently” by Edward Stourton: ”A year ago, with a house full of groaning shelves and books encroaching Triffid-like into every corner, I resolved to buy no more new books and to try out an electronic reader. Here’s what happened next.” “How Bert Jansch Changed Folk — and Rock, Too” by Sasha Frere-Jones: “As long...
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Dog Poetry
MERRILL MARKOE on Susan Orlean’s biography and cultural history of “The Wonder Dog of All Creation.” Picture Postcard courtesy of Immortal Ephemera
Susan Orlean Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
Simon & Schuster, September 2011. 336 pp.
In Hollywood in the early 1930s, a handsome German Shepherd from France was drawing a salary eight times larger than had ever...
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Literary Landscape ©
Stanford Kay The second installment of RICHARD RAYNER’s monthly column.
Arthur Machen The White People and Other Weird Stories
Penguin Classics, September 2011. 416 pp.
Arthur Machen (rhymes with “bracken”) was born in Caerleon-on-Usk, in Wales, in 1863. By 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, his once promising career as an imaginative writer appeared to be on the...
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– RECENT POSTS— Jonathan Lethem on Norman Mailer Marlene Zuk on the secret life of bees. Philip Goldberg on Sri Ramakrishna’s sexuality. The state of criticism at the present time.
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Growing Up
Coming of age in two debut novels:
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ on Justin Torres’s We the Animals
and CAROL SNOW on Christopher Grant’s Teenie. Man Weighing Himself © Dan McCleary 2004 Justin Torres We the Animals
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 2011. 144 pp.
The American novel has given us its share of troubled young protagonists. Think of Holden Caulfield, or Scout Finch; of Rhoda...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, October 6th: Join LARB contributing editors Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, Mona Simpson, and Michael Tolkin for a live action advice column, hosted by The Paris Review and PEN USA, at the Cactus Lounge at the Standard Hotel, Hollywood beginning...
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The Most Versatile of Mystics
PHILIP GOLDBERG
on insiders, outsiders, and the debate over Sri Ramakrishna’s sexuality. Bastra Haran, Krishna with Gopis (cowherdesses)
Ravi Udaya F.A.L. Press, c. 1910-1920s Courtesy of Om from India Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana Interpreting Ramakrishna
Motilal Banarsidass, July 2010. 300 pp.
Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world, and probably the...
