Book Stores Needed
Laredo, Texas is the biggest city in the United States without a bookstore (but there is a snowboard park near the Mexican border!). Maybe Laredo is afraid of too much information, or maybe it has more to do with the fact that people are shoplifting books like crazy, specifically The Bible, which probably is one of Texas’ biggest movers. Us, we’d sooner pull something from our dusty shelves than steal books from a store. But that doesn’t mean we’re not hoping for a few new titles this year. You can put Joseph Frank’s literary biography of Dostoevsky on our Christmas list. Add The Best European Fiction of 2010 to it, too. It’s hard to believe that books involving Monica Lewinsky are still coming out. But they are. Moving on, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne designs a fetus-shaped Christmas ornament and Stephen Burt recommends picking up 88-year-old Marie Ponsot’s latest collection of poetry. Her book is called Easy and it’s available everywhere, except Laredo. – Andrew Geer
– Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon took on a modest project this year: bringing Europe to America. As the editor of the Best European Fiction 2010, his task was to give American readers a taste of what they are missing by not reading (mostly due to lack of available translations) the diverse, entertaining, and innovative literature coming out of Finland, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania… really, countries all over Europe. — Aleksandar Hemon in Omnivoracious
A Sick Man
– In the mid-1950s, the young critic Joseph Frank, having been invited to give the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, settled on the then fashionable topic “Existential Themes in Modern Literature.” Since Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre both regarded Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground” (1864) as a central text of existentialism, Mr. Frank naturally plunged into an intensive study of that novella. His fascination with its anguished protagonist—who on the first page brazenly proclaims “I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man”—eventually led the critic to learn Russian and to plan a short book on the sociological and ideological roots of the Underground Man’s self-hatred. — Dostoevsky in The Wall Street Journal
– In the years since their bitter battle, both former President Bill Clinton and independent counsel Ken Starr have predicted they’d be vindicated in the history books. Now the first definitive history of the Clinton scandal is about to arrive — and neither man can be completely happy about his portrayal in its pages. — Monica Lewinsky in Politico
Kids, Time To Decorate The Tree!
– On New Year’s Eve, the Flaming Lips are set to turn Oklahoma City’s Cox Center into the capital of Weirdsville, U.S.A. when they bring their annual Freakout music-and-lights explosion to their hometown. Along with a standard Lips set and “the world’s biggest balloon drop,” the band will ring in 2010 by playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety with Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, a group led by Wayne Coyne’s nephew Dennis. — The Flaming Lips in Pitchfork
– Next April, Marie Ponsot will turn 89 years old. The best work in “Easy,” her sixth collection, responds — with cheer and tolerance, with terse good humor — to her accumulated years. “Old’s our game,” says the woman (not the poet) who speaks in the sonnet “We Own the Alternative”: “Mere failure to be young is not interesting.” What interests Ponsot instead is the set of perspectives that old age creates for her — calm, tolerant and often delighted. — Marie Ponsot in The New York Times
Video: A Concersation with Marie Ponsot
