June 2011
47 posts
Keeping the Eye Moving
ROBERT POLITO Cow Shingle Beach ©
Patricia Patterson 1.
Stein & Limits
Gertrude Stein eventually called her lecture Composition as Explanation, but as she worked through the repetitions and variations for the 1926 Cambridge Literary Club audience, “composition” proved the stuff not only of writing and painting but also...
15 tags
Whose Hollywood Is It Anyway?
PAUL MANDELBAUM Trust Me (cc) Steve Lambert Mona Simpson My Hollywood
Knopf, 2010. 384 pp.
As storytelling’s lifeblood is compassion, satire feeds off rage. Most Hollywood novels get their sustenance from both, though tend to binge on the latter. There’s a great deal to mock, obviously. It may in fact be so obvious, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. But in case you’re new...
9 tags
Egyptian Spring
GRAHAM HARMAN From Tweets from Tahrir © Sarah Carr Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, editors Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded in the Words of the People who Made It
OR Books, 2011. 160 pp.
On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Egyptians were scheduled to enjoy a national holiday: Police Day. But rather than being fêted by a grateful populace, Egypt’s police spent January 25...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Tuesday, June 14th: We Are Here: We Could Be Everywhere: Media, Arts and Activism in Los Angeles and Beyond. Panel discussion with Aniko Imre, Henry Jenkins, Reed Johnson, and Fabian Wagmister at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library starting at 7:00pm. !Women Art Revolution screening revealing...
19 tags
What Is African American Literature? A Symposium...
Part I of a series of pieces responding to Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (Harvard University Press, 2011) Today, essays by Walter Benn Michaels, Erica Edwards, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Phillis Wheatley by Scipio Moorhead (c. 1773)
CLASS
Walter Benn Michaels
One way of understanding Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? is as a book about...
7 tags
The Mysterious Island
HOWARD A. RODMAN
I’m writing this because I just found out that my favorite bookseller in the world, Michel Roethel, is dead. He was mysterious and his bookstore obscure. It was on the Rue Lagrange in Paris. It sold the works of only one author. And its proprietor didn’t like selling books at all: M. Roethel always seemed unhappy when a book managed to leave his shop.
Some...
Always, when a bookseller dies, the books weep.
We were given permission to use more pictures for Howard Rodman’s beautiful memorial to his favorite bookseller than we could use for the story, including this, by the photographer sansplans: Jules Verne Bookshop, March 16, 2011 © sansplans
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Extremely Short Excerpt: Greg Boyle’s War With...
The first wedding I ever did was in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a humble Quechua couple, and the Mass was in the main Jesuit church in the center of town. Standing room only with Quechua Indians in their absolute finest clothes. Quechua cholas in brightly colored hoopy skirts and shawls, with tiny bowler hats perched at a tilt, on top of their pinched-back hair. Men in suits with white collars,...
7 tags
Larry Flynt at Home
JEAN STEIN Larry Flynt by © Corey Cooley
Good morning, I am your worst nightmare come true: a fabulously wealthy pornographer with the courage and willingness to spend my last dime to expose how you are perverting the Constitution of this great land. Now let’s get down to business.
— “Larry Flynt for President” campaign ad, Nov. 1983 Dennis Hopper
I decided I was going to blow...
1 tag
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Wednesday, June 8:The writings of Paul Thek as read by Thomas Jane at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00. Thursday, June 9: Hammer Readings: New American Writing with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00. Ramsey McPhillips, Lynelle White, and a special surprise...
6 tags
Stars Inside Your Thumb
CHARLES HARPER WEBB Still from Trouble in the Image © Pat O’Neill Bob Hicok Words for Empty and Words for Full
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 96 pp.
Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet — if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative: “there are stars / inside your thumb, your breath, / and how you say yes or no is how they shine / or burn out,” he says near...
6 tags
Astounding Cosmic News
SIOBHAN PHILLIPS Photo © Lisa Jane Persky
Matthew Zapruder Come on All You Ghosts
Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 96 pp.
Matthew Zapruder will speak to you. This isn’t a metaphor, or a mere recommendation: it’s a description of method. In “Come On All You Ghosts,” the title poem of his third and latest volume, Zapruder calls directly to whomever might be taking in his lines at that...
2 tags
Rock and Roll (Ned Vizzini)
A few years ago I took a MediaBistro crash course in newspaper writing and learned the term “evergreen.” My instructor promised us that our clips were evergreen — that is, if we ever wrote for a paper, it didn’t matter if our piece was a week old or five years old: it could still get us our next job. It turns out that certain topics for newspaper stories are evergreen as well. (The most...
6 tags
Strange Lights
JANE SMILEY Map courtesy of the Library of Virginia
Sheri Holman Witches on the Road Tonight
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2011. 400 pp.
Sheri Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic. It is a strange combination, rather like the flavor of, well, maybe burdock leaves. She has written about the 15th century (in A Stolen Tongue), the 19th...
17 tags
Once Children
JESSICA FREEMAN-SLADE Snowy © Dina Goldstein
Kate Bernheimer, editor My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Penguin, 2010. 608 pp.
Adults who were once children tend to agree: we are who we are because of fairy tales. Once upon a time, they were the clearest — and most just-seeming — of all narratives, even if they weren’t entirely real. People got what they...
3 tags
Maria Bustillos responds to Sven Birkerts’ “The Room and the Elephant” (an essay which, she nicely says, gives her “a rather Eliza Doolittle-like feeling, like being invited to dance by the prince of Transylvania”) over at The Awl.
13 tags
The Room and the Elephant
SVEN BIRKERTS Man with Cuboid, M.C.Escher
Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never...
2 tags
The Outsiders (Caissie St. Onge)
In her Wall Street Journal article “Darkness Too Visible,” Meghan Cox Gurdon rails against the scourge of publishers who “use … fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives” through current Young Adult literature. No. Nuh uh. Nope. Let me register my disagreement right here. As Gurdon correctly points out, the YA genre wasn’t fully...
Funhouse Mirrors (Margaret Stohl)
WSJ Newsflash: Some Old People Don’t Like What Some Young People Are Reading! It sounds like an Onion headline. But it’s true; on Saturday afternoon, the WSJ (Media Translation: Old People) published a sweeping, genre-wide condemnation of the YA genre, inked by Meghan Cox Gurdon. By Saturday evening, YA’s unofficial Ambassador @libbabray (among others) took to the...
15 tags
Man Is Not Cat Food
BARBARA EHRENREICH Jack Kirby from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957
David Livingstone Smith Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others
St. Martin’s Press, 2011 Dale Peterson The Moral Lives of Animals
Bloomsbury Press, 2011 Paul A. Trout Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination
Prometheus Books, 2011. Jason Hribal Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden...
