December 2011
47 posts
15 tags
Notes on Theatre
Today The Dial is guest-written by playwright John Steppling, who has produced an evocative, idiosyncratic, wide-ranging set of “Notes on Theatre,” from which I have extracted the following series of aphorisms. They hearken back to the manifestos of the modernists in their radical rethinking of their subject and their manic and principled disregard for what you or I might think. ...
9 tags
Mentors: Jervey Tervalon and Bob Blaisdell on...
BOB BLAISDELL and JERVEY TERVALON recall MARVIN MUDRICK, the best American literary critic you’ve never heard of (with some input from the man himself). Apple © Ria Hills This week’s Mentor Series includes paintings of apples by artists who often complete a painting each day. From a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser. ¤ Marvin Mudrick created the...
10 tags
Letter from Cairo
FREDERICK DEKNATEL Cairo 2011 © Frederick Deknatel
“Why are we destroying our own city with our own hands?” the architect Nairy Hampikian asked last month in Magaz, an Egyptian design magazine. She was speaking of the decades of poor planning and infrastructure in Cairo under Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In the same publication, architect May al-Ibrashy wrote, “Cairo, always fast, has now become...
10 tags
Mentors: Geoff Nicholson on J.H. Prynne
GEOFF NICHOLSON recalls the daunting yet illuminating experience of having the famously inscrutable Cambridge poet J. H. PRYNNE as his Director of Studies. Apple ©
Elin Pendleton This week’s Mentor Series includes paintings of apples by artists who often complete a painting each day. From a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser. ¤
I sometimes say that...
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Mentors: Rita Williams on Alison Leslie Gold
RITA WILLIAMS pens an appreciation of her mentor, ALISON LESLIE GOLD. Apple ©
Jos van Riswick This week’s Mentor Series includes paintings of apples by artists who often complete a painting each day. From a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser. ¤
When I first heard of Alison Leslie Gold in the late eighties, I had no idea what a visionary author she...
3 tags
Siddhartha Deb: A Teacher of a Different Kind
In the ninth installment of the LARB’s Writers on Teachers series, Morten Høi Jensen discusses Siddhartha Deb, a rising star of the New York literary scene whose new nonfiction book on contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned, has met with some controversy (its first chapter was expurgated in the country to which the book is devoted, thanks to a court injunction). Edmund Wilson once...
30 tags
Clear Lines
JENNY HENDRIX
on the afterlife of Tintin. Tintin (and Snowy) Copyright © HERGÉ / Moulinsart 2011 — All Rights Reserved.
On March 3rd, 1983, the French daily Libération ran under an unusual cover: Against a black background, as though seen through a telescope, a circular drawing portrayed a cowlicked boy lying face down in the snow while a white fox terrier keened brokenly beside him....
Radar LARB
The Boxing Day Swim (courtesy fimb and flickr creative commons) Football and foxhunts, department store sales and epic sessions in the pub: as this article points out it’s a wonder Americans haven’t adopted Boxing Day for themselves (never mind it’s that other kind of football). O well. You still have the blips at Radar LARB (most Mondays): The Full-Stop editors: The Situation...
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Mentors: Clarissa Romano on Barry Hannah
Palette Knife Apple © Rob Hazzard This week’s Mentor Series includes paintings of apples by artists who often complete a painting each day. This week and next, we present reminiscences of great mentors and teachers, from a series originally published on our blog [click here], curated by C.P. Heiser. Today,
Los Angeles Review of Books editor CLARISSA ROMANO remembers novelist, short story writer...
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The Ghost of Books: Part V
JENNIFER EGAN, PADGETT POWELL, ANTOINE WILSON, MATT WEILAND, and DINAH LENNEY
Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books JENNIFER EGAN Ghost of Books Past:
For many years, I believed that my favorite novel was Catch-22. I remembered reading it as a teenager and being transported by the interweaving narratives and impressionistic style. It seemed a perfect amalgam of radical...
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Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley...
The seventh installment of LARB’s Writers On Teachers series: Sianne Ngai describes her time studying with Stanley Cavell. Find the whole series in one convenient sidebar near the top of the blog. I was a grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but...
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The Ghost of Books: Part IV
JANE SMILEY, MARK HASKELL SMITH, MORGAN MACGREGOR,
CULLEN GALLAGHER, and CHRIS KRAUS
Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books JANE SMILEY The Ghost of Dickens Past:
In seventh grade, we were assigned Oliver Twist. I was in the A section. Our teacher, Miss Fieselman, was a strict and humorless woman. We had two weeks to read the novel. The print was much smaller than the print...
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The Ghost of Books: Part III
MEGHAN DAUM, SESSHU FOSTER, LAILA LALAMI,
BEN LOORY, and CASEY WALKER Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books MEGHAN DAUM Present
Right now I’m reading a lot of Mary McCarthy. I have an assignment to write a long essay about her and I’ve been immersing myself in her and it’s just great. I’d read a biography and some of her journals years ago, but not much of the fiction....
The Long and the Short of It: Writings on...
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung Cover image for the English-language translation, from Nan A. Talese. LARB contributor and China matters specialist Jeffrey Wasserstrom offers multiple tiers of recommendation for year-end reading. ’Tis the season for best books lists, which—to invoke a Chinese saying—sprout up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Just in case somebody asked, I was...
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The Ghost of Books: Part II
BEN EHRENREICH, STEPHEN ELLIOTT, MATTHEW SPECKTOR, MARY OTIS, and AYELET WALDMAN Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books BEN EHRENREICH
My tastes haven’t changed much since I was about eight years old. Back then my favorite books were all about lonely children who in their wanderings happened across a mysterious portal that allowed them to slip away from the drab...
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The Ghost of Books: Part I
SVEN BIRKERTS, GARY PHILLIPS, and JULIE CLINE Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Ghost of Books: Past, Future, and Present” is an experiment not in terror and not necessarily Dickensian. We’ve asked certain writers to respond to the three times (or tenses) in the subtitle, or simply to the title. In “The Ghost of Books Past,” we learn what a...
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LARB Podcast #1: Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti
The authors of The Chairs Are Where the People Go
interviewed by TOM LUTZ
[Click on book cover to play audio;
iTunes version coming soon]
This is the first episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (soon to be available on iTunes). We hope these podcasts will go beyond the standard promotional Q&A pleasantries and promote genuine intellectual and philosophical...
7 tags
Philosophical Improvisations
JON COTNER
on Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s The Chairs Are Where the People Go.
For a podcast interview with Glouberman and Heti by Tom Lutz, click here.
Black Whole Conference ©
Michel de Broin, 2006 (72 chairs) Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City
Faber & Faber, July 2011. 192 pp.
At Pratt Institute,...
Radar LARB
Slavoj Žižek’s praise for Ralph Fiennes’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “For his forthcoming film adaptation, Ralph Fiennes (with the writer John Logan) has done the impossible, confirming in the process T S Eliot’s claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet. He has fully broken out of the closed circle of interpretative options and presented Coriolanus...
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L.A. Woman
STEFFIE NELSON
on Eve Babitz’s Hollywood.
Painting © Maria Przyszychowska from a Photograph by Julian Wasser
In Eve Babitz’s third book, Sex and Rage, the main character Jacaranda Leven comes upon a black-and-white photograph hanging in a grand Hollywood penthouse apartment, next to “a David Hockney swimming pool, and a huge pornographic watercolor by John Altoon.” Shot by Julian...
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Object Relations
CAMERON SHAW
on making and showing art while black in Los Angeles. Untitled © David Hammons 1989 Courtesy Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Connie Rogers Tilton, Lindsay Charlwood, eds. L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints
Tilton Gallery, September 2011. 424 pp. Kellie Jones, ed. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
Hammer Museum, Delmonico Books, Prestel, October...
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A Spectacle and Nothing Strange
By Eve Fowler This summer I made 20 silkscreen posters, like the ones that are posted around LA advertising concerts, boxing matches and other events. The text on my posters came from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I placed these posters in public spaces around Los Angeles. I have been working with this particular text in various ways for about a year. Some of the...
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Was Gertrude Stein a Collaborator?
RENATE STENDHAL on Gertrude Stein’s latest revival and the enduring questions about her wartime years. Gertrude Stein ©
by Carl Van Vechten 1934, Courtesy of Marquette University, Raynor Memorial Libraries Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12 - September 6, 2011 The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde SFMOMA
May 21 -...
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Thoroughly Modern Elsa
BRIAN KIM STEFANS
on the rediscovery of a modernist innovator. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (detail) by George Grantham Bain Courtesy of George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, editors Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven
The MIT Press, October 2011. 440 pp.
The typical thumbnail portrait of the...
LARB Recommends
Los Angeles International Airport by Garry Winogrand featured at In Focus event on 12/20. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, December 15th: Carson Mell will be reading from his new novel The Blue Bourbon Orchestra and signing copies at Family beginning at 7:30 pm. Slake at Chevalier’s Books featuring poet Luke Davies,...
4 tags
The Girl with the Father Tattoo
LARB Science Editor MICHELE PRIDMORE-BROWN on the changing nature of father-daughter alchemy. Profil en Face Herbert Bayer, 1929 Peggy Drexler Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family
Macmillan/Rodale Press, May 2011. 210pp. The Silas Marners and the Heidis
On a frigid winter’s night in the novelist George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a newly orphaned...
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The Right Fit
ROSTEN WOO
on how the spacesuit was made. Spaceman © Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of the Emshwiller family Nicholas de Monchaux Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
The MIT Press, March 2011. 380 pp.
Not long ago, I spent an afternoon inside Biosphere II, a 3.14-acre vivarium designed as an experimental “self-contained” ecosystem. Biosphere II hosted two missions — the second aborted in 1994 — in which...
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The End of the Beginning
BEN EHRENREICH
on moving onward.
The Beginning is Near cc Alexandra Clotfelter (Some rights reserved)
Oh, the fickle hearts of elected officials. Like hummingbirds, only not pretty. To call a mayor or a city councilman slippery is to insult every smooth, wet stone that has ever graced a streambed. To call them faithless is an offense to all adulterers. To call them liars is, well, too...
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Pulp Nonfiction: An Interview with John Jeremiah...
by Michael Goetzman J. J. Sullivan, Skylight Books. November 15th, 2011Image by Michael Goetzman John Jeremiah Sullivan seems disconcerted when asked who’s most influenced his writing. There’s a long, pained pause. It’s an impressive silence — followed by a sigh, followed by an “I don’t know,” which, I realize, is probably an accurate answer. How could anyone know? Identifying one’s influences is...
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World-Shifting
CHARLES YU
on Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. Image cc
Lisa Jane Persky Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 925 pp.
Most people can’t, or at least don’t, read a 925-page book in a couple of nights. In fact, if you happen to have any of the following: (i) a television, (ii) access to the Internet, (iii) one or more...
Radar LARB
Cirocco Dunlap’s “Literary Genre Translations”: “Original Text: ‘I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.’ Sci Fi text: ‘I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.’” Adam Penenberg on “The Next Great Media Form”: “The MP3 of journalism may be the “live...
5 tags
Literary Transactions and Their Vicissitudes
E. C. McCARTHY and LISA C. HICKMAN
respond to Glen David Gold’s piece about William Faulkner and Joan Williams [“On Not Rolling the Log (Transactions along the Mississippi Delta)”] Joan Williams. Courtesy Lisa C. Hickman E. C. MCCARTHY Sucker Punch
Glen David Gold is a heartbreaker.
The first few paragraphs of this piece [On Not Rolling the Log] hooked me: writers and...
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CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, NATHANIEL PHILBRICK, ROBERT...
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
on three exceptional works of nonfiction.
Christopher Merrill The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War
Milkweed, October 2011. 305 pp.
Christopher Merrill has always believed in quests. Over many years and many books he has traveled out, confronting fear, admiring the courage and conviction of others, standing on the shoulders...
12 tags
A Singer's Singer
GAYLE WALD
on a new biography of soul legend Little Willie John. Little Willie John
Courtesy Universal Attractions Susan Whitall with Kevin John Fever: Little Willie John: A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul
Titan Books, June 2011. 352 pp.
Little Willie John was a small man with a big voice, an outsized talent who could croon and growl, sing ballads and rhythm and blues,...
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Fail Better: After Recent Occupy Evictions, Jack...
“Oh, Lol0”: Heavily-favored Lolo Jones doesn’t live up to expectations in Atlanta. Hope is fried. Change is burned out. Sentimental, noncommittal, notional: Messieurs Hope and Change have proven to be as disappointing as their historic standard-bearer, the current President of the United States. As we speak, they are likely pacing shabby cages—gaunt shadows of their former,...
11 tags
The Return of the Gods
ARNE DE BOEVER
on Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s polytheistic philosophy. “The European” ©
Keith Sonnier Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
Free Press, August 2011. 272 pp.
Last August, I traveled to France to participate in a reenactment of Plato’s banquet at the house of...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, December 8th: Slake After Dark presents Ben Ehrenreich and Triple Chicken Foot at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm. OR Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books celebrate the publication of Alive Inside the Wreck by Joe Woodward at the L.A. Press Club beginning at...
5 tags
Southpaw Grammar
DAVID YOURDON
on life among the left-handed. Detail from Saint John of the Cross ca.1675 © National Gallery of Art, Washington Francisco Antonio Gijón and unknown painter (possibly Domingo Mejías) Rik Smits The Puzzle of Left-handedness
Reaktion Books, October 2011. 381 pp.
Being left-handed is nothing special, as much as left-handers (of which I’m one) might like to believe otherwise....
4 tags
Genghis Khan's DNA
INGRID NORTON on Steven Pinker’s history of violence. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd “Non Violence” 1985 Malmö Photograph by ϟ†Σ © Some rights reserved Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Viking, October 2011. 802 pp.
“The Past,” Steven Pinker declares, “is a place where a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.” In 13th century Eurasia, the...
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The Pump You Pump the Water From
SVEN BIRKERTS
on writer’s block. Image: cc Lisa Jane Persky When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal,...
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Between the Georges
Photo: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com Today The Dial belongs to F.X. Feeney, who remembers his friend, collaborator, and antagonist, the late director George Hickenlooper.
— Tom Lutz
F.X. FEENEY 1.
His heart stopped while he slept, in a moment of triumph. The next morning he failed to appear at a breakfast meeting and was found dead in his room. He was only 47 years old. He was my friend....
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You. Are. Invented.
HOWARD AKLER on Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan Migration ©
Rob Evans Courtesy of the artist HOWARD AKLER A Smooth Dialectical Dance Austin Wright Tony and Susan
Atlantic Books, May 2010. 352 pp. 1.
Let’s begin at the end. An eighty-year-old man is visited by his daughter. This man is a retired university professor, a literary critic of some renown with seven out-of-print novels to his...
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Waking from the Dream of Alaska
LISA LOCASCIO on Melinda Moustakis’ Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories Melinda Moustakis Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories
University of Georgia Press, September 2011. 150 pp.
If nothing else, the enduring fame of Sarah Palin is an indicator that the American imagination is as preoccupied as ever by the idea of Alaska. The forty-ninth state has been fertile ground for the...
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Citizen Kael, Part II
LAURIE WINER
on the life and work of Pauline Kael. [For Part I, by Richard Schickel, click here.] Pauline Kael © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. All rights reserved. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org Brian Kellow Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
Viking Adult, October 2011. 432 pp. LAURIE WINER Taste is the Great Divider
When I discovered Pauline Kael circa 1977, I loved her immediately and...
19 tags
From the Other Coast
LYTTON SMITH
on British poetry and riot. Riots on the streets of Tottenham CC Nico Hogg This is the first installment of a recurring series titled From The Other Coast. In this series writers from other English speaking countries will be looking at the work of contemporary poets they admire whose work may be unknown to an American audience. When I’m abroad I’m consistently struck by the sheer...
3 tags
Slick 4-Star Flicks Spark Kids' Film Fete
In his extensive archival research for “Half Termite, Half Elephant,” his review of Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence posted on the main site today, Mark Haskell Smith turned up the following never-before-seen document, which appears to depict a young Lethem having a formative ecstatic experience (click to enlarge):
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Half Termite, Half Elephant
MARK HASKELL SMITH
on Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence. Persistance of Memory © Lou Beach Jonathan Lethem The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
Doubleday, November 2011. 480 pp.
Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. is a one-man omnibus, and you’re either on it or you’re not.
A shotgun blast of multitentacled musings, it splatters the author’s...
