More Books and Bicycles

ronhogan: Rebecca from Connecticut likes the following books: U...

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:24:32 -0400

Rebecca from Connecticut likes the following books:

U and I, Nicholson Baker

Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer

The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm

Footsteps, Richard Holmes

What books do Tommy Wieringa and I recommend for Rebecca? (You’ve probably got some great suggestions of your own; add them when you re-blog!)

Tommy Wieringa is the author of Little Caesar. His previous novel, Joe Speedboat, won the Bordewijk Prize in 2006 and was long-listed for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, as well as nominated for the AKO Literature Prize. He lives in Amsterdam.

(taped at WORD Brooklyn, Greenpoint)

I’m “Rebecca from Connecticut,” and I’m excited about these recommendations! I’ve been meaning to read both authors for a while now but haven’t done it yet. Now I will.

Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement"

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:02:00 -0500

“I just called myself a connoisseur of novels, which stretches the definition a little: ‘An expert judge in matters of taste.’ I have a deep interest in my two inches of ivory, but it’s a rare connoisseur who does not seek to be an expert judge of more than one form. By their good taste are they known, and connoisseurs tend to like a wide area in which to exercise it. I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts — and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines — I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_smith (Full essay not available online)

“There are choices we can make as consumers and as members of a creative community. A lot of...

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:01:50 -0500

“There are choices we can make as consumers and as members of a creative community. A lot of the stuff I’m about to mention might seem very obvious. It’s definitely stuff you’re already doing. Let’s resolve to do more.

1. Buy books. New and old books, print books and ebooks, hardcover and paperback books, used and brand-new books.

2. Buy books from all kinds of stores.

3. Borrow books from libraries.

4. Recommend books. Use social media to discuss your reading. Use book clubs to discuss your reading. Use conversations with friends to discuss your reading. If you think someone you know would particularly like a book, tell her. Give her the book as a present or take it out from the library and hand it to her.

5. Thank people who have recommended books to you.

6. Read and write about books.

7. When writing about books online, don’t default to linking to a particular book retailer when mentioning the book. A lot of literary sites always link to Amazon because by doing this they get some amount of money via the Amazon Affiliates program. I believe that these sites should reevaluate their business models.

My current default is to link to Goodreads, but it’s probably even better to mix it up.

8. Diversify your sources of book recommendations. Start reading a different magazine or blog of book reviews.

9. Start a book club. And join ours. :)”

http://emilygould.tumblr.com/post/40027265553/a-highly-placed-big-six-exec-i-respect-to-no-end

The problem with the problem with memoir

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:15:03 -0500

“It’s easy to point to bad memoirs and use them to attack the entire form but the form is never the problem. When you attack personal writing you attack Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. In truth most books are bad and most publishers are risk averse. Many bookstores are going out of business. The changing media landscape has made it harder for journalists to make a living. But that’s not a problem with memoir.”

http://therumpus.net/2013/01/the-problem-with-the-problem-with-memoir/

"I actually wouldn’t wish I had a gun. I’ve shot a rifle at camp once, but that’s about it. If I had..."

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:08:26 -0500

“

I actually wouldn’t wish I had a gun. I’ve shot a rifle at camp once, but that’s about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter’s work for him (it’s usually “him.”) But the deeper question is, “If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?” It’s funny, but I still don’t know that I would. I’m pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life — and living — on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it’s enough to have a baby. It’s a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I’d have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I’d have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like “living” as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don’t really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I’d rather work on my swimming.

”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates (via ayjay)

laurenzuni: Bully Calls News Anchor Fat, News Anchor Destroys...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 08:39:36 -0400

laurenzuni:

Bully Calls News Anchor Fat, News Anchor Destroys Him On Live TV. This woman is a bad ass.

“Magic Hours demonstrates clearly the bind of being a modern essayist: One must present...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 06:43:22 -0400

“Magic Hours demonstrates clearly the bind of being a modern essayist: One must present oneself as an authority, but an authority who is also compelled to confess that to be human is necessarily to be weak, frightened, flawed. The position is somewhat irreconcilable, and the discomfort thereby engendered also speaks to something very deep, I suspect, in the kind of North American reader liable to have picked up the book in the first place. It’s a very familiar discomfort. Fans of this kind of writing might share the consciousness, with Bissell and his cohort, of being too lucky, too rich, too educated — privileged, powerful, but flawed, even undeserving. This disconnect winds up making the book really very good, which is to say, entirely true to the experience of its likely readership.”

http://staging.lareviewofbooks.org.php53-3.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/article.php?type=&id=572&fulltext=1&media=

“I was not raped or victimized. I am not 13, uneducated, or impoverished. I do not live in...

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:15:44 -0400

“I was not raped or victimized. I am not 13, uneducated, or impoverished. I do not live in Kansas or Alabama or North Carolina or Arizona. I did have some excellent consensual sex without benefit of wedding ring or adequate health insurance. And then I got pregnant and the choices at my disposal threw me into a monthlong tailspin until, in a few painful hours, those choices vanished, through a very nonmagical physiological process.

No one has unlimited choices; that’s a fact. So what lingers after this long, hot, confusing summer is this: With so many forces legitimately outside our control – forces of biology, history, geography, age — why is every woman in the United States not running blue-faced onto the field to do battle with those who would take what choices she does have away?”

http://therumpus.net/2012/09/knocked-over-on-biology-magical-thinking-and-choice/

“What to make of this? There is a violence to reviews like this, to reading reviews such as...

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:12:08 -0400

“What to make of this? There is a violence to reviews like this, to reading reviews such as this, that depresses the spirit, that makes me feel silenced, when all I wrote about, which is not even acknowledged in the review, is the theories and histories of women writers who have been silenced by the culture. I feel flayed alive. I feel humiliated and shamed. I feel like giving up. But that’s horrible too, all that power, when that is the opposite impulse of the book, which traces my coming to writing and other women’s coming to writing and tries to theorize what made them stop writing. What I hate is that so much of the work is aware of how women writers have been historically read and dismissed, and yet I still give that dismissal so much power. What I hate is that I muse about contemporary and future girls who want to be writers, and encourage them to be brave in drawing from their own lives for their literature, despite the taboo against memoir, despite how they will be dismissed, despite how girls have always been dismissed, told that they are silly and self-indulgent and shouldn’t have a voice anyway.”

Kate Zambreno

http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/one-can-be-dumb-and-sad-at-exactly-same.html?m=1

“The serious critic can’t merely be an ecstatic initiate either, however—someone whose worship...

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:28:44 -0400

“The serious critic can’t merely be an ecstatic initiate either, however—someone whose worship of Art and artistes can threaten to devolve into flaccid cheerleading. The negative review, after all, is also a form of enthusiasm; enthusiasm and passion for the genre which, in this particular instance, the reviewer feels has been let down by the work in question. The intelligent negative review, indeed, does its own kind of honor to artists: serious artists, in my experience, want only to be reviewed intelligently, rather than showered with vacuous raves—not least, because serious artists learn from serious reviews. (The best advice I ever got, right before the publication of my first book, was from a publishing mentor who told me, “The only thing worse than a stupid bad review is a stupid good review.” And he was right.) For this reason, any call to eliminate negative reviewing is to infringe catastrophically on the larger project of criticism: if a critic takes seriously his obligation to pass judgments—which, merely statistically, are likely to have to be negative as well as positive—his sense of responsibility to those judgments and their significance has to outweigh all other considerations. People who want to go to lots of parties without provoking awkward literary encounters should be caterers, not critics.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/a-critics-manifesto.html?mobify=0

Fear of a Black President

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 07:31:09 -0400

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama’s insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina’s effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy—white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/

In Praise of Fact-Checkers

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:01:45 -0400

“Being fact-checked is not very fun. Good fact-checkers have a preternatural inclination toward pedantry, and sometimes will address you in a prosecutorial tone. That is their job and the adversarial tone is even more important than the actual facts they correct. In my experience, seeing your name on the cover of a magazine will take you far in the journey toward believing your own bullshit. It is human to do so, and fact-checkers serve as a valuable check to prevent writers from lapsing into the kind of arrogant laziness which breeds plagiarism and the manufacture of facts. The fact-checker (and the copy-editor too actually) is a dam against you embarrassing yourself, or worse, being so arrogant that don’t even realize you’ve embarrassed yourself. Put differently, a culture of fact-checking, of honesty, is as important as the actual fact-checking.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/in-praise-of-fact-checkers/261368/

How To Write a Bad Review

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 05:46:07 -0400

“Sixth, be balanced. If there is awful writing in the book you’re reviewing, and you want to quote it, go right ahead. But if the book is 5 percent awful and 95 percent fine, don’t spend 75 percent of your review quoting the worst passages. People do this when they’re angry. I understand: sometimes, when I am reading a book, I hate the things I hate far more than I like the things I like. But succumbing to the hate means that you are giving your reader an unbalanced view of the book. Indeed, your job is to characterize what the book is like — to give as full a picture as possible of the experience of reading it. This means, analyze the writing style, the flow of thoughts, the narrative approach–not just a plot summary and a bunch of rotten quotes. Control your emotions. Want the writer to be good. Want all writing to be good. If this writing is not good, regard the situation as regrettable, rather than cause for an end zone dance.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/18/how_to_write_a_bad_review//

"Twitter Isn't Killing Books"

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:51:37 -0400

“There seems to be a nostalgia, both implied by Silverman’s essay and in other corners of the critical world, for the good old days (which are not actually behind us) of sharp, negative reviews. There is a grave misperception that a negative review is more honest than a glowing, enthusiastic one. Indeed, negative reviews make careers and get attention, even if like Dale Peck’s savage New Republic pieces, the author regretfully walks some of them back later, after his name is made, after the anthology is sold. Nevertheless, it’s practically a fetish for some critics, recalling those better, savage days. Ooh, remember when Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead!

But why are we even framing criticism as either negative or positive? The most interesting book reviews are those that make me think, the reviews that bring out interesting themes in a work. Good criticism is not merely about liking or disliking a book or exploring a books merits and failings. Good criticism, for me, is about trying to understand how the book works and what it offers, or doesn’t, to contemporary culture, where the book fits within a tradition, and how it speaks to history.”

Roxane Gay. http://www.salon.com/2012/08/06/the_internet_is_too_nice/

From Kate Zambreno, whom I will read SOON

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:47:46 -0400

“Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren’t they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.”

http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.com/2012/07/rough-edges.html?m=0

“Jonah Lehrer is part of a system that allows magazines, year after to year to publish men,...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:26:44 -0400

“Jonah Lehrer is part of a system that allows magazines, year after to year to publish men, and white men in particular, significantly more than women or people of color. He is part of a system where the 2012 National Magazine Awards have no women nominees in several key categories. He is part of a system where white editors belabor the delusion that there simply are few women or writers of color who are good enough for their magazines because said editors are too narrow in what they want, what they read, what they think, or just too lazy to work beyond their Rolodex of writers who look and think just like them. He is part of a system that requires an organization like VIDA to do an annual count that reveals a disheartening, ongoing and pervasive practice of a certain kind of writer predominantly gaining entrance to the upper echelons of publishing. He is part of a system that exhausts itself denying these problems exist or that these problems matter.

Lehrer certainly didn’t create this system, but he didn’t challenge the way it coddled him, either. That system is working overtime right now to justify what Lehrer has done, to vouch for his intelligence, his personality, his struggle, his genius, to explain how this debacle happened in ways that completely absolve the system and allow it to remain intact. This is how it works when you’re part of the system. When you’re not part of the system, when you’re a woman who self-destructs so spectacularly, for example, the system works overtime to excoriate, to shred all dignity. The system still stays intact.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/jonah_lehrer_throws_it_all_away/

The "Busy" Trap

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 06:32:48 -0400

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?smid=tw-share

This piece is so awesome I'm reading Le Guin again ASAP

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 09:46:20 -0400

“Anybody who reads a lot is, if you like, an addict. The people who put their initials on the fly-leaf of a library copy of a mystery so that they won’t keep checking the same book out over and over are story addicts. So is the ten-year-old with his nose in The Hobbit, oblivious to dinnertime or cataclysm. So is the old woman rereading War and Peace for the eighth time. So is the scholar who studies the Odyssey for forty years. The very quality of story is to hold, to fascinate. Ask the Wedding Guest to stop listening once the Ancient Mariner gets going. He can’t. He’s hooked. Sometimes you get hooked on mere plot, sometimes on mere familiarity and predictability, sometimes you get hooked on great stuff.”

http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/06/18/le-guin-s-hypothesis/

“A market economy, even a mixed market economy, will have winners and losers. Some of that...

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:25:25 -0400

“A market economy, even a mixed market economy, will have winners and losers. Some of that will be luck of the draw, and some of it will be the results of untoward shenanigans, but as long as people perceive that there’s a generally fair method of winning that’s somewhat under their control — such as hard work — then they’re pretty willing to tolerate some shenanigans on the side. I might be a little annoyed at some of what investment bankers have been allowed to pull, but as long as my family and I are doing fine, it won’t rise above the level of annoying.

But if legitimate avenues up start all closing at the same time, a certain fatalism starts to make sense. That fatalism can be politically passive, as in drug addiction and small-time crime, or politically active in ways I prefer not to think about.

If we want to maintain a mixed market economy, we need to maintain some perceived level of basic fairness. That means realistic and ethical ways for a kid whose parents don’t make much money to climb by his own effort. Piece by unthought piece, we’re blocking those ways. Some of that may be outside of our conscious control, but much of it isn’t. Before we send a message to an entire generation that there’s just no point in bothering, let’s at least stop blocking constructive effort. Kids can read patterns, and if the pattern says that they needn’t bother, they’ll draw some pretty awful conclusions.”

http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2012/06/pattern-recognition-or-world-at-16.html?m=1

"The hideous cloud of productivity now looms over all our lives. It seems that actual writers use..."

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:12:56 -0400

“

The hideous cloud of productivity now looms over all our lives. It seems that actual writers use productivity apps to get on with their articles and books. Helen Oyeyemi advises writers to download the Write or Die app onto their computer (or does she write on an iPhone?). In ‘kamikaze mode’, if you stop writing for more than 45 seconds it starts deleting the words you have already written. Other writers claimed they use it (‘great for those days when you simply can’t start’) or joined in with advice for getting those words down on the page… .

So let me join in. First, I have a workaround for Write or Die: don’t write any words, and the bastard app can’t delete them. That’ll show it. Second, wonder if chucking words at a blank space is really what writers have to do to get their work done. The article talks about writers’ block. If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head. Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all. It’s not as comfy as writing a thousand words in half an hour, but it seems to work OK, so long as you think of it as part of a process of writing rather than writer’s block.

”

- Jenny Diski, being an adult. (via ayjay)