Walking A Slippery Slope
While much of the country endured a weekend of heavy snow, Vashon enjoyed balmy days and relatively clear skies. We took advantage of the pleasant weather and headed to the north end of the island, where recently a new hiking trail was cleared. The trail is two miles long and descends into the belly of a deep gorge, which is populated by hulking, moss-strewn trees and thousands of silvery ferns blinking in the sunshine. The warm weather resulted in inch-deep layers of wet mud, occasionally turning the serene hike into a treacherous downhill slide. All this got us thinking about the power of place — how its dualities influence the stories we read and the stories we write. The crime writer Philip Carlo understands. He’s made his career visiting prison cells and profiling the mafia’s nastiest assassins. But now the tables have turned and he’s trapped in a very different type of prison, his own body. A writer in The Atlantic wonders how the ghosts of Christmas present compromise her domestic bliss and the editor of Granta considers this year’s best debut fiction. Elsewhere, a Hungarian novelist describes the challenge of creating art while living in a virtual police state, a novel written by Mary McCarthy in 1963 is praised as being ahead of its time, and The Economist explains how human identity is a simple and profoundly complex arrangement. Finally, it wouldn’t be Monday without a throwback to a bygone era, which, in this case, means admiring artistic propaganda from the 1960′s. That’s some dual nature, man. — Kevin Murphy
– “The worst disease of modern times has got me by the throat,” said Mr. Carlo, who uses a motorized wheelchair and breathes through a hose that forces pressurized air into his lungs. “I can’t brush my own teeth. I can’t feed myself.” But he continues to work on a new book, a memoir, writing the words in his head and dictating them to an assistant at a laptop. “I have a deadline,” he said. “My own death.” — Philip Carlo in the NY Times
When The Present Is The Past
– Perhaps it’s an inevitable consequence of developing as a human being–the only member of the animal kingdom with the unique gift and burden of being able to imagine the future and regret the past. That sense of timeline, past and future–including the ability to imagine what doesn’t yet exist–is what’s given us virtually every new invention since the wheel, of course. But it does have its downsides. When we’re small, we are more like a puppy–happy or sad in the moment, oblivious to the past and future. — Christmas Ghosts in the Atlantic
– The gilded age of publishing is over, and with it, it would appear, the splashy debut. Gone are the seven-figure advances and the 22-city book tours. And that’s just fine. Writers were never meant to be rock stars, and publishing them as if they could be was absurd. Writers become writers because they are comfortable alone. Out of that silence emerges a kind of music that doesn’t need screaming fans. — Debut Fiction in NPR
– The chance to publish a passage from your novel prompted me to devote a whole issue of Múlt és Jövő to the writings of Imre Kertész and Dezső Szomory. That is why I would be grateful if we could tip our discussion very distinctly towards Szomory—all the more so as you have written and said very little about Hungarian literature. In the official address that you made when you received the Nobel Prize the only Hungarian writer you mentioned was Gyula Krúdy. This morning as I was waiting for your call, I read again what you wrote about him in Galley Boat Log. — Imre Kertész in Hungarian Literature Online
Same Group, Different Place
– Few works of literature can genuinely be termed “ahead of their time”, but Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, now reissued by Virago, is one of them. Despite commercial success (it remained in the US bestseller charts for two years), it was not universally acclaimed. Norman Mailer’s sneering review from October 17, 1963, in The New York Review of Books, for example, is a fascinating, if slightly unhinged, read (see nybooks.com), in which he ultimately dismisses The Group as an insignificant “lady-book”. — Mary McCarthy in the Times Online
– With the construction of the railways in the 19th century, a new sociological phenomenon was born: the travelling criminal. Until then, police had relied on local communities to recognise a bad apple in their midst, but now the felons were on the move, wreaking havoc in communities which had no knowledge of their past and hence no reason to be wary. For law enforcers trying to contain the problem by sharing descriptions of known recidivists, it became imperative to answer one question: what is it that identifies someone as a particular person? — Human Identity in the Economist
– Carl Williams, who heads up the Counterculture division of Maggs Bros. modern department, has curated an eclectic spread of over a hundred posters, illustrations, propaganda pamphlets for Maggs Gallery’s current exhibit, Please Do Not Bend. He recently sat down with Daven Wu of The Sixties for an interview about the exhibition and his job, which we are pleased to excerpt here. — Counterculture Art in Book Patrol
Video: Counterculture Propaganda
