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September 15, 2006

FRIDAY MARGINALIA

Many, many thanks to Martha Southgate for a Herculean blogging debut yesterday.  Herewith, all the literary goodies that have piled up in our inbox:

* As has been widely noted, the Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, and all the big names - Carey, Mitchell, Messud, Gordimer - are toast.  Why the hell not, we say?  We enjoyed the Carey and the Mitchell, but they were scarcely the best books of the year, and no one should get a pass on name alone.  We've got three of the shortlisted titles (Desai, Grenville, Hyland) and plan to jump into those in the next week.  The Independent, which includes brief synopses of each, suggests that the shortlist might represent a "turning of the literary tide."

* Pace Sara Gran, the New York Times looks at the literary identity of Brooklyn.

Is there such a thing as a Brooklyn aesthetic? A Brooklyn voice?

You could make an argument for it, though the Brooklyn voice has evolved. In the earliest colonial days, Brooklyn was seen as a kind of Eden. Writers celebrated its light, its air. The man sometimes called the first Brooklyn writer, Jasper Danckaerts, wrote in his journal in 1679 of its open roads and little woods: “It is impossible to tell how many peach trees we passed, all laden with fruit to breaking down.” And the first really famous Brooklyn writer, Walt Whitman, saw it in the same golden light: “Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!” he cried in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

* Opprobrium is rapidly being heaped upon the sponsors of The Sobol Award, which is handing out a $100,000 prize generated by its $85 entry fee.

* A stone slab found in Veracruz, Mexico might be the oldest writing discovered in the Western Hempishere.  Preliminary forensics suggest a draft of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence ...

* The Times runs a lengthy interview with Martin Amis, which is infinitely superior to a lengthy essay by Martin Amis.

* Writing for Nextbook, Paul LaFarge looks at a new biography of Irene Nemirovsky, which raises disquieting questions about her work and her life.

In Némirovsky's fame, which lasted for ten years, nine more novels, two films, and a few dozen short stories, was mostly a right-wing phenomenon. Her books were serialized in the Gringoire, a newspaper that attacked Jews, immigrants, and Léon Blum's Popular Front in its editorials. Némirovsky's work was admired by the anti-Semite and future collaborator Robert Brasillach, and she in turn admired the work of Paul Morand, whose wife, Hélène, was an ardent pro-Nazi. If Némirovsky was uncomfortable in such company, she gave no sign of it. Weiss, her biographer, suggests that she was in the throes of a "discomfort with regard to her origins." Her family had moved in Gentile society, high above the ghetto of Kiev, and she may have learned distaste for the unassimilated Jews with whom she risked being identified. Also, like other White Russians, she seems to have held Jews accountable for the revolution. "The aim of my life," she wrote in a notebook, is "to document myself about Trotsky's life, as a sort of eternal Jew, always in revolt...a traitor, a bit of a bum."

* The novelist Achmat Dangor has been appointed chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

* Roald Dahl's youngest daughter has returned to his birthplace in Wales to participate in the celebration of what would have been his 90th birthday.

* Jennifer Egan's The Keep is reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  (Egan will be coming through L.A. on a book tour at the end of September.  More details to follow.)

* Blindness, Jose Saramago's superb 1998 allegory, is going to be adapted for the screen by Fernando Meirelles (City of God).  We can't begin to guess at how that screenplay is going to be written.  (And don't say "In Braille.")

* Telegraph's Literary Life:  Mailer doesn't matter.

* The Huntington Library (a TEV top-five Los Angeles spot) has announced the donation of a substantial Bukowski archive.  Shotglasses included.

* Well, if Kinky Friedman isn't elected as governor of Texas, he still might win the Thurber Prize.  (We'd probably prefer the Thurber.)

* Michael Frayn's got a 500-page book on ... wait for it ... philosophy.  There's no punch line - which, according to the London Review of Books, is a pity.

So the news that Frayn had done a whole book on philosophy was a cause of anticipatory glee. What’s more fun, after all, than seeing one’s colleagues skewered? But the skies darkened when a copy actually turned up in the mail. For one thing, it’s clear at a glance that this is no joke; it’s a book of philosophy, not a book on philosophy, and I can’t imagine an author who is more in earnest. It’s also clear that the thing is much too long. These days nobody writes philosophy in chunks of four hundred pages (plus notes). Partly that’s just fashion; partly it’s tenure politics; but mostly it’s because the problems philosophers work on have turned out to be much more subtle than we used to suppose them, and much more idiosyncratic. You have to do them one at a time, and the progress you make is generally inch by inch. For better or worse (I think, in fact, it’s much for the better), almost nobody has ‘a philosophy’ any more. What one has, if one is lucky, is a glimpse of an insight into (as it might be) the semantics of intentional contexts; or the behaviour of modals in obligation ascriptions; or the way natural laws support counterfactuals; or whether knowledge is warranted true belief – and what, while we’re at it, does ‘warranted’ mean? After what seems in retrospect to have been a very extended adolescence, philosophy has settled into workaday middle age. It comes to all of us sooner or later.

* More lettuce for John Updike: He's been given the Rea Award.

* The new Paris Review is on the stands and features an interview with unrepentant fraudster Laura Albert (nee JT LeRoy).

* If academic bloggers get you all hot and bothered, you'll want to check out the Kenyon Review's entree to the blogosphere.

* Scott McLemee on defacing, um, making notations in your books.  (We actually picked up a method that Nicholson Baker promulgated some years ago in the New Yorker: He makes a small dot in the margin beside a section of writing that catches his eye, and on the back flyleaf notes the page numbers of said dots.)  We actually like Scott's method:

The most generic is “NB” (nota bene) – a suggestion to give the passage more attention, for any of various reasons. Slightly more focused in intention is “CK,” meaning that it makes sense to check a fact or citation. If the book is on a topic of long-term interest, the annotation may point to a reference it is worth following up on. But often CK implies doubt. Something in the text feels “off” – if not enough so to merit the more emphatic and clearly defined “BS.”

It is worth cultivating a knack for apt quotation. The marginal note “Q” is an important tool. I’ll often identify several times as many quotable bits as I ever use, but that is not such a disadvantage, and learning to keep an eye out for them is a good practice. Likewise with “def,” which goes next to definitions of crucial terms.

Even more important are the passages marked with the Greek capital letter Sigma. In mathematics, it is the symbol for the sum of an operation or series. I use Sigma next to statements defining the book’s intention, method, structure, or conclusion (or any combination thereof). Such passages sum everything up. I also use Sigma to indicate moments that clarify for me what is at stake in an argument -– whether or not it seems likely that the author would concur.

The emphasis of any given mark can be qualified by either a question mark (“say what?”) or an exclamation point (“oh man!”). The symbols also occur in various combinations, including the dreaded “Sigma BS.”

* And finally, we are pleased, thrilled, honored and delighted to (belatedly - forgive us Dan) trumpet the formation of Dzanc Books, the latest power player in the literary fiction scene.

Dzanc Books is set up to operate exclusively for charitable, literary, and educational purposes. Dzanc will publish two excellent books of literary fiction per year, as well as work in partnership with literary journals to advance their readership at every level. Dzanc is also fully committed to developing educational programs in the schools and has already begun organizing many such workshops and Writers In Residency programs.

We can get down with that. 

Posted at 12:15 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Jim Ruland

Books are machines to be used, amigo, not artifacts to be admired.

Posted by: Jim Ruland | September 15, 2006 at 03:35 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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