August 2011
47 posts
10 tags
Cut and Paste and Run
EMILY GREEN
As part of our ongoing inquiry into the future of journalism,
Emily Green talks about finding her research
(and her words) in someone else’s book. Twin Roads No Guitar ©
Andrew Schneider
So, I find myself wondering, what am I going to do about the man who I think plagiarized me?
Sue him? I’ve bleated to a few lawyers. Humiliate him in front of his editor? I’ve...
12 tags
Wunderkind
JULIANE MARIA LORENZ on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s unlikely career in television. Juliane Maria Lorenz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder during the filming of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1979 © Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF) Juliane Maria Lorenz is a highly acclaimed film editor who lived and worked with the legendary German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1976 until his death...
7 tags
Returning to the Scene
MICHAEL WASHBURN
on Janet Malcolm’s revisitation of the relationship between the journalist and the murderer. Jury Box © Amanda Curreri, 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Romer Young Gallery Janet Malcolm Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Yale University Press, April 2011. 155 pp.
Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, an...
LARB Recommends
Photo from Bike It: Portraits of my Bicipandilla featured on Thursday, August 18th.
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.
Wednesday, August 17th: Hammer Lecture: Making Art Last discussing technical, ethical, and artistic concerns surrounding the preservation of contemporary art works at Hammer Museum beginning at 7:00pm.
...
9 tags
Hybrid Memoirs
CHRIS WALLACE interviews GEOFF DYER on the American release (finally) of his The Missing of the Somme. VERONICA GONZALEZ on Francisco Goldman’s memoir/novel of grief and longing. Empty Bed © Helen Masacz, 2011 MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
Veronica Gonzalez Francisco Goldman Say Her Name
Grove, April 2011. 288 pp. Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands
Of the death’s-head shadowing...
One hundred down
L-R: Evan Kindley, managing editor; Tom Lutz, editor in chief
Today’s LARB post — a double shot of Eastern European literature — is the hundredth offering on our humble Tumblr site, which was launched on April 18, 2011. (I’m just going by what it says on the Tumblr dashboard; actually, if you consider all of the posts, like today’s, that have combined reviews by two or sometimes...
17 tags
From Ljubljana to Budapest
ADAM Z. LEVY on a new translation of Hungarian Dezső Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti, a little-known 1933 novel that deserves mention with Kafka and Mann.
CASEY O’NEIL on the great Slovenian writer Boris Pahor’s memoir of his visit to the Natzweiler memorial and his 14 months in Nazi prison camps. Shouting
by Hugó Scheiber HUNGARIAN MASKED BALL
Adam Z. Levy Dezső Kosztolányi...
3 tags
Time to celebrate...with a brand new LARB t-shirt
Our 100th posting appears on the LARB Tumblr tomorrow. Celebrate the occasion with a visit to the LARB store where you will find the first official LARB t-shirt, designed by Malisa Humphrey, and starring Emily Dickinson. Support the future of book reviewing and help us to move a little closer to the fully operational Los Angeles Review of Books web site, coming soon. (Model: Kate Wolf; Photo:...
13 tags
Even as Everything Melts
JONATHAN FOLTZ
on Malcolm Turvey’s history of avant-garde film in the 1920s.
René Clair, Francis Picabia, and Erik Satie, Entr’ acte (1924) Malcolm Turvey The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s
MIT Press, March 2011. 213 pp. In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.
— Walter Benjamin, on Mickey Mouse
Film has...
2 tags
In the Charles Wright Museum
GARRETT HONGO
remembers the graduate school summer he house-sat for Charles Wright.
Still Life with Red Pears and Knife on a French Cloth ©
Julian Merrow-Smith
In the late spring of 1981, the skies were always a light azure blue in Southern California, cypresses camphored out their scent around the apartment house swimming pool below my living room window, and the soft green prisms of...
14 tags
The Intimate Art
NANCY BARNES
on the letters of two quintessential American artists. Georgia O’Keeffe Writing Daily Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, Ghost Ranch House Patio. Photograph by Maria Chabot © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum http://bit.ly/q7lnAr
Sarah Greenough, editor My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915-1933
Yale University Press, June 2011....
5 tags
Howler Among the Pros
: Barry Hannah Remembered
Photo courtesy of Lemuria Books
As we launch our new Writers on Teachers series – a semi-regular department featuring guest columnists on the people who have influenced them most – Los Angeles Review of Books editor Clarissa Romano remembers novelist, short story writer and mentor, Barry Hannah.
“Are you above the greed and ambition of the characters in these stories?” 3 pm, Thursday...
LARB Recommends
Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall featured in Drohojowka Philp’s book, Rebels in Paradise
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.
Wednesday, August 10th: Readings from Slake: Los Angeles No 3., War and Peace featuring writers Ben Ehrenreich, Joseph Mattson, Amy Scattergood, Hank Cherry, John Tottenham, and Owen Wiseman at Stories...
5 tags
An Invitation to Forgetting
CASEY WALKER
on Joshua Foer’s memory palaces. Date Mate Sate Grate © Wayne White, courtesy Western Project Joshua Foer Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Penquin, March 2011 320 pp. I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining...
LUC SANTE'S ADVICE FOR WRITERS
Luc Sante in an interview by Karolina Waclawiak on The Days of Yore Any advice for struggling writers? Read. Don’t be afraid to imitate. Develop your ear for rhythm and voice and tone and register. Reread what you’re working on again and again and again. Pay attention to every word and every punctuation mark. Print out what you’ve just written and then retype it, slowly. Don’t let...
6 tags
Year of the Fire Cock
MARK HASKELL SMITH
on Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, published today, and the raunchiness of the Generation of ‘57. Happy War © Kii Arens Nicholson Baker House of Holes: A Book of Raunch
Simon & Schuster, August 2011. 272 pp.
I was born in 1957, the Year of the Fire Cock in Chinese astrology. Cocks (or Roosters as we’re sometimes called) are considered keen...
2 tags
London
It’s a terrible irony that we’re running David Mattin’s letter from London — written and scheduled last week, before the riots began — on the main site today. Right now our collective thoughts are with David, all of our other British contributors and friends, and with the people of England.
2 tags
Full Stop Halts the Tumble
With tumbling markets, tumbling credit ratings, and tumbling sanity unspooling from the news aggregators this morning, Alex Shephard’s article at Full Stop was a welcome departure. In our own weekend Tumblr, the Los Angeles Review of Books featured “Future Tense,” an essay by Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz. We’ve received a lot of responses to the piece, which included the...
11 tags
Exile on Fleet Street
DAVID MATTIN
on Rupert Murdoch’s beef with the British. The Paper House, Wanted: Peeking Out cc Curious Expeditions
Rupert Murdoch’s strange, covert reign over British public life did not begin all at once. It came about gradually, by accretion, and started with his purchase in 1969 of a dusty old tabloid called The News of the World.
In the same year, the BBC — keen to...
15 tags
Future Tense
TOM LUTZ
© Giant Robot
The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last week that it was as dedicated as ever to book coverage — “we have not changed our commitment,” said Vice President of Communications Nancy Sullivan. Sullivan was speaking to Publishers Weekly’s Wendy Werris, explaining that a new round of layoffs in the section and the cutting loose of the book section’s...
