1. Ha ha. I knew Penguin’s collaborative wiki-novel would be a dud. Still, whoever managed this experiment for Penguin should have tried harder to avoid the obvious traps of dumb jokiness and intentionally bad writing (”Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent”). Let the record show that for 24 hours starting on July 23 2004 over a hundred poets worked together on LitKicks to write a single long poem. But here’s the key: instead of letting the throng dictate the …
And now for something completely different …
Linda Plaisted is a visual artist whose work I’ve been following on Flickr for a few years now (full disclosure: sometimes Linda and I send each other neat stuff in the mail, and I have a few of her prints around my house). Lately, I’ve been thinking about storytelling and how it has a broader reach than writing alone, and while browsing some of Linda’s images, I was struck time and again by …
As teenagers, James Morrow and his friends made short 8mm movies based on Coleridge and Poe stories. Morrow went on to earn a master’s degree from Harvard University, then published his first novel, The Wine of Violence, in 1981. His latest, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, prompted the Library Journal to compare Morrow to enlightenment luminary Denis Diderot, “A man who believed that literature and philosophy marched hand in hand and who was not afraid to discuss serious matters in a comic tone.”
For …
Today’s New York Times Book Review jumps into the contemporary Chinese fiction scene, featuring Jonathan Spence on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Liesl Schillinger on Serve the People by Yan Lianke, Pankaj Mishra on Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, Francine Prose on The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi and, finally, an intriguing endpaper by Aventurina King on a ridiculously famous and fashionable 24-year-old novelist named Guo Jingming who revels in apolitical pop culture and last year had …
“You’ll notice an empty chair has been placed next to the podium on stage. This is to symbolize those writers who could not be here today due to political oppression.”
Thus intoned Leonard Lopate at New York City’s uptown 92nd Street Y, introducing a major PEN World Voices event featuring Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa and Umberto Eco. Ironically, at just this moment I was caught in a chaotic crush in the back of the auditorium along with several other late arrivals and second-tier …
A lunchtime PEN World Voices panel with global journalist Ian Buruma, Burmese author Thant Myint-U and Words Without Borders editor Dedi Felman today offered a look at the modern history and current politics of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation that all three panelists agreed was little understood around the world. I arrived at this panel discussion knowing almost nothing of this nation’s culture and society (and not for lack of interest), so I believe they’re right.
I didn’t know, for instance, that …
At one of the kickoff events for New York City’s PEN World Voices festival,actress Mia Farrow, critic Bernard-Henri Levy and novelist Dinaw Mengestu met tonight at the Alliance Francais to discuss the ongoing genocidal situation in Darfur, which has gotten no better after five years of worldwide apathy. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in squalid, barren refugee camps after their villages were bombed and destroyed by the Sudanese government (the conflict — no big surprise — originated in ethnic battles …
In 1973, as a follow up to his highly successful “Transformer” album, Lou Reed released the album “Berlin”. The ten-song concept album tells of the disintegration of a couple living in Germany. The couple, Caroline and Jim, follows a dark path that starts with drug addiction and descends into infidelity, spousal abuse, loss of children due to unfit parenting, and, ultimately, suicide. The album was a commercial flop upon release. Rock critic Lester Bangs, up until this point a huge Lou Reed …
Two weeks ago a New York Times Book Review cover article by Niall Ferguson all but endorsed John McCain for President, also referring to a book that called for eternal USA military domination of Muslim nations “the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war”.
This weekend’s New York Times Book Review continues to buttress up the pro-Iraq-War position that is at …
1. I’m ready for my fifteen minutes of fame now.
2. The culture wars: comic style.
3. Laura and Jenna Bush held a discussion of the children’s book they collaborated on, Read All About It!
4. I remember being thoroughly engrossed with and creeped out by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca when I read it in high school, then having the same reaction to Hitchcock’s film version when I saw it a few years later, so the story behind how du Maurier wrote the …