August 2012
60 posts
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Directors as Rock Stars
Paul Cullum, whose piece “Hypnotizing Chickens: On Werner Herzog — and Alan Greenberg on Herzog” is live on the main site now, offer this tantalizing sidebar for t-shirt enthusiasts and mash-up freaks everywhere. (Disclaimer: the following article may include skeins of jerry-rigged cultural abstraction.) Phil Anderson, owner of Cinefile Video in Santa Monica, California, has created an...
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Speed, Systems, and Shame
by Lee Konstantinou
In my last round-up, I complained that the #OccupyGaddis Goodreads group was kinda quiet. Since then, it’s been on fire. A debate started in the discussion forum titled “Discussion of pp. 211–240” about whether J R is “hostile” toward its readers (continuing a debate that started on Twitter). In this thread, Brian writes, responding to a blog post by Sonia...
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Radar LARB
Bukowski’s Last, Unpublished Poem, via Fax
Ploughshares’s oh-so-thorough cheat sheet for all things literary in Los Angeles: ”The literary life of Los Angeles is like a newly discovered shortcut or a charming local bistro. You sort of don’t want anyone to know about it for fear it might get ruined…”
Michelle Dean on “Critics...
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Post-Pussy Riot Verdict: Punk and Protest in China...
Interested in learning more about possible parallels between the Pussy Riot phenomenon and Chinese punks, rebels and rockers, LARB Asia Editor Jeff Wasserstrom shot an email full of questions to Jonathan Campbell. Why turn to Campbell? Because he spent 10 years living among, writing about, promoting, and playing the music of rockers in Beijing:
“…in the Chinese context, the reaction...
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The Posthuman Imagination, part 1
“Corporations are people too, my friends.”
When I began to research postmodern American authors in the mid-1980s, I was fascinated by the way that complex systems and objects could themselves sometimes become characters in a fiction. The JR Family of Companies clearly has not much to do with any of the nuclear families in the book or with J R himself (who is more of a sorting demon...
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“The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties...”
– Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth”
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.
(via classicpenguin)
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“(Chorus)
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,
Virgin...”
– —Carol Rumens translates Punk Prayer, the song that put Pussy Riot in jail, and explains why previous translations weren’t up to snuff.
Also of note: the literary influences Pussy riot cited in their closing argument.
(via millionsmillions)
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Radar LARB
“Writer-on-Writer Crimes” by Andrew Scott: “If ‘the literary world’ excludes ‘regular’ readers—if it really just means other writers, editors at literary journals and magazines, editors at presses both small and large, agents, publicists, sales forces, independent bookstore owners and big chain bookstore employees, distributors, professors and students...
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Cafe Society
The unavoidable feeling of despair that Mahfouz captures permeates Egyptian society today — a condition all too often overlooked by the new crop of Egypt experts multiplying within international media. While the revolution marked a high point in the ability of people to organize in the Middle East, the people of Egypt remain divided, conflicted and downright frightened at the current state of...
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Hubris and Envy
Robert Zaretzky with some historical perspective on the Lehrer affair:
His book, hailed by the critics, presents itself as a guide to human nature; it claims scientific rigor, yet is written for the non-specialist. And then, it is discovered that when he is not recycling old material, the author has simply invented new material, fobbed it off as true and put it in the mouths of the people he...
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Radar LARB
“Parisian Novels” | Vincent Van Gogh
“Ignoring David Foster Wallace’s Religion” by Daniel Silliman: “The forthcoming biography of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, seems very unlikely to shed any light on Wallace’s faith or spirituality.
Though it’s known...
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Wax Poetics
“BLOODLESS DUELING with wax bullets” made only one appearance at the Olympics: the 1908 games that moved from Rome to London after an eruption at Mt. Vesuvius. According to Popular Science magazine, “great interest was taken in the bloodless dueling tournament,” but it’s not difficult to imagine why Olympic officials might remove an event in which people, representing nations, shoot live ammo...
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What happened to this place?
Part 2 of LARB’s People’s Guide series is coming Monday. Read Part 1 here (featuring downtown LA’s Pershing Square).
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Going the Distance
To invest oneself in a stranger, to say I believe in that person, and keep saying it for a decade — it’s the same kind of impulse that leads us to start novels, poems, families — the same kind of unyielding optimism that keeps us from abandoning them even when the brightness fades and the rhythms are tired and the truth seems impossibly distant. To root for Galen Rupp the way my father has is...
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Can you haiku?
Today, on our twitter, the Olympics of poetry.
Tweet us an Olympic themed haiku (or reply to this post!) and be sure to check out our poetic Olympic coverage.
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The Dreamy Team
If Harden were a poet, he’d be Walt Whitman. He doesn’t look at all like an NBA shooting guard. He looks like a Portland, Oregon bartender who listens to God Speed You Black Emperor and makes knock-off Danish furniture in his garage. But once on the court, everything about the way Harden moves is like a line from “Song of Myself”: a clear idea flying through contorted syntax. Was Whitman also...
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Give us 60 seconds and we'll give you a free...
Calling all LARB readers: please take a minute to complete our first ever Reader Survey. It’s a quick and easy way to show your support for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and every response will help us continue to grow. All respondents who provide their email address will receive a free copy of Snappy and Reckless, our ebook collecting the very best writing on noir and crime fiction
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Body Limits
In Olympic lifting, there is very little room for invention. The snatch and clean and jerk have been essentially the same for a century (the Olympic press was eliminated from competition in 1972). What affects the lift are the miniscule variations, a one degree angle change in the trajectory of the weight, an imperceptible lean of the weight to one side, a one hundredth of a second lag in your...
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Know How to Fall: Poetry and the Trampoline
“With trampoline, a gymnast’s job is to fight gravity, to use the power of her own body to propel herself upwards, to fly for 60 seconds, then finally stick a landing while the force of her own energy tries to knock her off her feet. So how to write when life has not been like the trampoline? When there has been, for a period of time, no flight, no fixed program, just a long stretch of...
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Wrestling, Long Poems, and Time
“There are three opponents in wrestling — the self, the other wrestler, and time.”
Today our poet athletes tackle wrestling and soccer at the Los Angeles Review of Books Olympics. Read more.
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Radar LARB
Gore Vidal, The Art of Fiction No. 50: INTERVIEWER: You once said the novel is dead. VIDAL: That was a joke.
“How I hacked my brain with Adderall: a cautionary tale”: “Up until my mid-twenties, I considered myself a learning maximalist: never wanting to specify a direction for myself, preferring always to try to keep up with everything that was going on around me. For the...
