Savvy Bookishness
More times than not we consider ourselves savvy individuals, especially when it comes to literature. After all, it’s what we do, and think about, and dream about. But, after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger, our proclaimed savviness is under construction. Are Shields’s concepts the stuff of a manifesto, or do they merely parlay the insight of thinkers from the past? Luc Sante weighs in on the NY Times. Speaking of manifestos, where do war veterans turn when they want to relive their experiences through books? Tim O’Brien comes to mind. But where else? Lewis Carroll was a tricky fellow; perhaps he should have been a mathematician, which leads us to The Big Short, a book about numbers and the housing crash of 2008. Elsewhere, John E. Bolt is interviewed in Bookslut, a critic pursues her fascination with taxidermy, and the Guardian figures the value of publishing the advice of aging poets is worth its stock in gold. Talk about savvy. — Kevin Murphy
– Consider the state of literature at the moment. Consider the rise of the memoir, the incidences of contrived and fabricated memoirs, the rash of imputations of plagiarism in novels, the overall ill health of the mainstream novel. Consider, too, culture outside of literature: reality TV, the many shades and variations of documentary film, the rise of the curator, the rise of the D.J., sampling, appropriation, the carry-over of collage from modernism into postmodernism. — Reality Hunger in the NY Times
A Veteran's Collector's Item
– He turns it over in his hand. He is seated in the auditorium of the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital (commonly known as the Sioux Falls VA Medical Center). Twenty or so hospital professionals sit around him in respectful silence. They have finished reading Tim O’Brien’s classic war novel “The Things They Carried” and have gathered here to discuss its implications as part of the state pilot program Literature and Medicine, designed to encourage those who work with veterans to read and discuss war literature. — War Literature in ArgusLeader.com
– Readers familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll will see much in these few sentences to remind them of the strangely logical and always symbolic world of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where concepts become weirdly animated. Think of the caprice of the Red Queen, at whose sovereign will and pleasure knaves and servants bow and scrape. And the avowal that a writer should attach any meaning to a word or phrase sounds straight out of the mouths of any of the mad and maddening poets of these books. — Lewis Carroll in Slate
– In the run-up to the housing collapse of 2007–2008, houses weren’t merely expensive, they were insanely expensive. Yet just when it seemed that prices couldn’t go higher, some fool would come along and pay an enormous sum for a glorified hovel. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that American real estate was overvalued. It did, however, take something special to figure out how to make money off the madness. A group of between ten and twenty people did just that, making the bet of a lifetime that author Michael Lewis calls “The Big Short.” — The Big Short in Book Forum
Gorgeous, No?
– If you are the kind of reader who thinks Susan Orlean’s smart, offbeat pieces in The New Yorker about chickens, pigeons, or, well, taxidermy, are the best thing going in nonfiction, then Still Life is the book for you. Melissa Milgrom doesn’t offer a personal introduction or an explanation of the genesis of her idea—she simply jaunts off in search of working taxidermists and hopes we’ll follow her down this neglected path. — The Living Dead in The Second Pass
– When Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900 to 1920: Art, Life and Culture in Russia’s Silver Age arrived at my door, I flipped through it and was instantly captivated. I sat on the floor in my hallway, pulled the book into my lap, and sat there for hours. It’s physically beautiful, reproducing prints by Mikhail Larionov, Mikhail Brubel, Natan Altman, Zinaida Serebriakova, Natalia Goncharova, and — a personal favorite of mine — Leon Bakst. There are photographs of Russian society and intellectuals. An aged Tolstoy is here, as well as Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe with his dyed grey lock of hair, and countless others artists, architects, designers, dancers, poets, journalists are here, too. — John E. Bolt in Bookslut
– This remarkable gathering of new work by senior British poets has been some months in the planning, but it seems appropriate to publish the poems over the weekend when we celebrate Mother’s Day (though Father’s Day would have been equally apt). “When I am old, I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in “Warning”, once identified as the nation’s favourite postwar poem, and her beautiful but less well-known “Lullaby” is reproduced here. — Aging Poets in the Guardian
Video: A Good Old British Poet
