Dig 'Em Up
A front is blowing in. The temperature is dropping and the sky is gray. I’m thawing a turkey. Its pale mass grows soft in my sink. It is a dead thing and tomorrow I will fry it.
There is death everywhere. It comes with the season. Bodies are massacred, buried, or being exhumed. Even the bookish are doing their part.
If Nicolas Sarkozy has his way the French will dig up Camus’ corpse. Kode9 is launching Sonic Warfare. James Wood is scattering dirt on the work of Paul Auster. Bookslut is talking translation with a woman who has spoken for the dead. And Robert Lopez is doing his part to bury the comma.
Oh, the humanity. –Brian Allen Carr
– President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the remains of the writer Albert Camus to one of the most hallowed burial places in France, but the plan has run into opposition from the Nobel laureate’s son, who does not think his father would have wanted the honor. — Albert Camus in the New York Times
– I’ve been translating Marías since 1991 and Saramago since 1998, so I’ve had plenty of practice tackling those long sentences. The difficulty lies, of course, in getting every bit of the sentence to connect syntactically and coherently without losing the rhythm or the reader. It is difficult and requires a lot of re-reading and rewriting, but it’s very satisfying when one of those page-long or two-page-long sentences really works in English with no loss of cogency.– Margaret Jull Costa in Bookslut
Kode9
– Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture. Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture. Because we live in a condition of ubiquitous music and media, and near infinite technological memory, it is much easier for local cultures to find an audience that resonates with their music, whether local or globally. At the same time the acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they’ve even happened. That’s a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.– Kode9 in Pitchfork
– Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model. It is 1967. Adam Walker, a young poet studying literature at Columbia, mourns the loss of his brother, Andy, who drowned in a lake ten years before the novel opens. At a party, Adam meets the flamboyant and sinister Rudolf Born, Swiss by birth, of German-speaking and French-speaking parentage. Born is a visiting professor, teaching the history of French colonial wars, about which he appears to have decided views. “War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul,” he tells a startled Adam. He tries to get Adam to sleep with his girlfriend. Later, we learn that he has worked clandestinely for the French government, and may even be a double agent.– James Wood in The New Yorker
– I always start with language. It became clear right away that this narrator’s voice, his manner of speech was not at all measured or ordered. The second sentence — “I will say the hello how are you …” presented itself as one uninterrupted phrase, as opposed to “… the hello, how are you …” There was an urgency to his language, the syntax and diction and lack of punctuation all came together at once. After that there were a number of places where commas would ordinarily go, but it didn’t fit his voice or the tone of the piece.– Robert Lopez in The Faster Times
Video: At a Robert Lopez Reading
