We are packing to move (yet again)* so this week's posts will tilt toward the compendium-of-links mode, unless we're moved to coherence. As it happens, loads of good stuff piled up over the weekend so sit back for this latest installment of Links Melange ...
* Check out the latest Bat Segundo podcasts. LBC nominees Jeffrey Ford and TEV favorite Sheila Heti are the latest to get the treatment. (You can even hear us introduce the Heti podcast.)
* Philip Roth's latest continues to draw attention, most recently from Time Magazine, The Globe and Mail and from the Los Angeles Times Book Review's own David Ulin.
* The Chronicle reviews William H. Gass' A Temple of Texts.
* The Washington Post brings a ringside report of Saturday night's PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony.
* A nice double dose of Banville - The Guardian uses the release of the paperback version of The Sea as an opportunity to revisit the book. Nicholas Lezard avers "we can count ourselves privileged to be around at the same time as he is." And in the Independent, there's the great pleasure of Banville confonting Mark Rothko, one of our favorite painters, as he writes about the experience of visiting the Tate Modern's Rothko Room.
The room is one of the strangest, most compelling and entirely alarming experiences to be had in any gallery anywhere. What strikes one on first entering is the nature of the silence, suspended in this shadowed vault like the silence of death itself - not a death after illness or old age, but at the end of some terrible act of sacrifice and atonement. In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors.
* Deutsche-Welle visits some of the noted "literary houses" of Northern Germany, including The Buddenbrook House in Lübeck.
* Imitating the Irish, the Welsh have started up a literary pub crawl, but the coolest aspect of this story is the name of its host - Myrddin ap Dafydd. Any Welsh readers who care to provide a phonetic guide to pronouncing that will get .. .well, nothing but our appreciation.**
* Writing for the London Review of Books, Colm Toibim takes a comprehensive look at Borges: A Life. (Link updated - thanks, Will!)
* The Salon du Livre wrapped up this weekend with 250 publishing houses promoting French language literature.
* The Los Angeles Times Op-ed page has run an adapted version of Dana Gioia's remarks at the recent Los Angeles Times Book Awards.
* The excellent Globe and Mail takes a look at the reading habits of the recently deceased John Kenneth Galbraith.
Rather late in life, he was introduced to the work of Robertson Davies, which he thereafter avidly consumed. No doubt one reason was that Davies set his Deptford Trilogy -- Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975; all three published by Macmillan Canada) -- in rural and small-town southwestern Ontario, not far from where Galbraith had grown up; this, however, was more likely a co-ordinate attraction. Far more powerful, Galbraith insisted, was "the ring of truth" in Davies, embedded in his richly imagined physical, social and moral landscape, and ornamented with what Galbraith found to be "an extraordinary range of wholly unpredictable information."
* The Jakarta Post takes note of the literary contributions of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died last week.
* And finally, the best part of this tale of a young reader is the author's byline. Yes.
* If you're a publicist/editor/agent type who hasn't received our change of address notice, please drop a line and we'll forward it straight away. Hate to see lonely books collecting on an abandoned doorstep.
**A reader knowledgeable about Things Welsh advises that it's "pronounced something like Merthin ap Dahveth. F sounds like v, dd sounds like th." Ddank you ...
It's bad enough that your Bolshevik shenanigans have taken over my show for several installments. I haven't heard the results. I'm too delicate. And I hope that I can digest tonight's meal.
But if they're now giving litbloggers the floor, then I shall have to have my people talk with the producer.
Now excuse me while I drown my sorrows in drink.
Posted by: Bat Segundo | May 08, 2006 at 05:10 PM