November 2011
55 posts
18 tags
Antoine Wilson's Notes on "Hack"
Photo: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com
The Dial is an occasional column that on some days will serve as my soapbox, but more often it will feature guests whose work is either closely personal, experimental, or otherwise off our usual diet of book reviews and review essays. H.L. Mencken once said that “a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas,” and I suppose the same goes...
16 tags
Three Novels
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
on novels by Lily Tuck, Michael Cunningham, and Maile Meloy.
Lily Tuck I Married You for Happiness
Atlantic Monthly Press, September 2011. 208 pp.
You suspect it’s true: what we remember at life’s end are the vacations, the concerts, the dinners with friends. In one of the most beautiful love songs in novel form you’ll ever read, Nina...
13 tags
The Things We Carry
JOCELYN HEANEY on teaching in a community college and the talk about higher education. Soldier Reading a Book © JoAnn S. Makinano Marjorie Garber The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon Books, 2011. 283 pp. Geoffrey Galt Harpham The Humanities and the Dream of America
University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp.
Mike wouldn’t sit with his back to the door: “I can never be sure who is on the...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, November 18th: West Hollywood Lecture Series presents The Art of Cruelty featuring Maggie Nelson at the West Hollywood Library beginning at 7:00 pm. The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading by poet Tony Trigilio at the PRB @ the Public School...
5 tags
Puns, Games, and Mathemagic
CHELSEY PHILPOT
on the enduring magic of The Phantom Tollbooth. Norton Juster (Author), Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) The Phantom Tollbooth 50th Anniversary Edition
Knopf Books for Young Readers, October 2011. 288 pp.
In her August 2004 article for the New York Times, “Why Teachers Love Depressing Books,” writer and critic Laura Miller wrote, “I decided that there were two types of...
4 tags
The Books That Made Us: The Phantom Tollbooth
The Phantom Tollbooth’s 1961 cover image by Jules Feiffer. Whenever I am in the company of any person on the planet, and I mention that I mostly write for young people, that person without fail will offer up, unsolicited, their favorite book from childhood. Usually their face will light up. They can remember details. They say things that make me think that, somehow, that book helped form...
22 tags
2050 or Bust
FREDERICK DEKNATEL on urban planning in the Egyptian desert. Pipes being installed in Dar es Salam neighborhood of Cairo, January 2011 © Meredith
Hutchison. Courtesy of the Photographer and CairoFromBelow.org David Sims Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control
The American University in Cairo Press, 2011, 335 pp.
This past August in Heliopolis, the Cairo suburb built over...
8 tags
The Educational Lottery
STEVEN BRINT
on the four kinds of heretics attacking the gospel of education. Felicity Allen, ed. Education
Whitechapel/MIT Press (Documents of Contemporary Art), August 2011. 240 pp. Philip W. Jackson What Is Education?
University of Chicago Press, December 2011. 136 pp. John Marsh Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality
Monthly Review Press, July 2011....
Radar LARB
Now back to the blips: “Inside Occupy Wall Street” by Jeff Sharlet: “It started with a Tweet – ‘Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule’ – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture....
7 tags
Our Zombies, Ourselves
ALIX OHLIN
on Colson Whitehead and the undead. Reclaimed Sewer Pipe ©
Kelly Barrie 2010. Digital C-Print Courtesy of the artist and Maloney Fine Art. Colson Whitehead Zone One
Doubleday, October 2011. 272 pp.
In Zuccotti Park on Halloween, protesters dressed up as zombies in suits, eyes vacant and deranged, fake blood and money dripping from their lips. A directive had been sent from...
6 tags
This weekend, responses from six LARB contributors
to the continuing Occupy movement. Image: GStrike Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND info@gstrike.org Today:
JOSHUA CLOVER on Occupy Cal and the fight over California education; MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI on Occupy Harvard;
and JOSHUA HARDINA on Occupy Riverside. ¤
Yesterday: DAVID LAU on Occupy Oakland, before and after last week’s general...
6 tags
Seize the Ponies
JOSHUA CLOVER
on Occupy Cal and the fight over public education in California. Police try to stop Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement from speaking at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. AP file photo 1964 Protester brought to the ground by police in front of Sproul Hall, November 9, 2011.
The actions this Wednesday on the UC Berkeley campus under the banner “Occupy Cal” were the...
8 tags
Crimson Front
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
on Occupy Harvard. Photo: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
On Wednesday, November 9, Occupy Harvard began. The university is frequently accused of being an “academic gatekeeper,” but the administration and police response to the nascent protest movement has made this gatekeeping uncomfortably literal: Harvard Yard has been placed on indefinite “lockdown,” meaning two-level...
4 tags
The Battle of the People's Kitchen
JOSHUA HARDINA
on Occupy Riverside. Image Source: http://on.fb.me/tjNPj7
In early October, about a month after the original Wall Street occupation had begun in New York’s Zuccotti Park and inspired offshoot occupations around the world, people began to stage their own general assembly meetings in Riverside, California.
I moved from Seattle to Riverside in 2003 to attend graduate school at...
6 tags
Big Tent
SONALI KOLHATKAR
on the strange bedfellows of Occupy Los Angeles. Photo: Sonali Kolhatkar
It took Los Angeles exactly 15 days to spawn a solidarity protest after New Yorkers began camping out in Zuccotti Park in mid-September. Within a month, Occupy L.A. quadrupled its presence on the grassy lawns surrounding City Hall. Despite complaints about damaged grass and expenditures on police...
13 tags
Letter from Oakland
DAVID LAU
reports from the Bay Area, before and after the general strike. Photo: David Lau PART 1: Impressions on October 30, 2011 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....
6 tags
People's Libraries
JASON BOOG
on the return of the thirties.
In the spring of 1935, the famous novelist Maxwell Bodenheim crashed the New York City welfare office and begged for relief after five years of the Great Depression. His career had stalled, and Bodenheim hadn’t earned a dime since his final novels had flopped. He was working on a manuscript called Clear Deep Fusion, but he would never finish it. His...
16 tags
Another L.A. Look
PETER PLAGENS
on Pacific Standard Time and the story of Los Angeles art. Hegemann Wedge Courtesy of and © Ed Moses 1971 Collection of Phyllis & John Kleinberg
Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980
Getty Research Institute, October 2011. 352 pp.
As all the world knows — especially that part of the world that runs from the eastern borders of San Bernardino, Riverside, and...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, November 10th: Slake presents Slake After Dark: Héctor Tobar and RT’N the 44s, a night of readings and music at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm. Michael Gross discusses and signs Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles at Book Soup...
11 tags
Real Penguins in Imaginary Apartments
ANTHONY OLCOTT
on Andrey Kurkov’s oddball Russian crime fiction. Burning Man with Penguin © Joseph Draye Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin
Melville House, June 2011. 240 pp. Andrey Kurkov Penguin Lost
Melville House, September 2011. 240 pp.
There are three comparisons that reviewers unfamiliar with Russian literature will make when describing works translated from Russian: If the...
