Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on November 7, 2008
Filed Under Roundup
- Some long-form posts are in the works. But for now, we revert back to the rushed blogger’s trusted steed: the wacky roan known as the roundup!
- Thanks to a helpful commenter, I have spent a portion of the morning at Married to the Sea, an online comic that relies on clip art. Clip art-based comics represent a great place to observe the associative mind at work.
- I have seen neither Black Watch nor Romantic Poetry. While I’m likewise inclined to quibble with needlessly dogmatic art, I should point out to Messr. Teachout that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage without experiencing a single battle. Art does not necessarily require first-hand experience to be emotionally true.
- O-oh, here they come / Watch out pub, they’ll chew you up / O-oh, here they come / They’re some cash eaters
- The 2008 World Fantasy Award winners have been announced. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel took home the novel award. (via Booklist)
- At the Telegraph, Stephen Adams is reporting that a team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics is claiming that novels should be taken just as seriously as fact-based research. While I have always admired Tom Clancy’s ability to explain a complicated subject in layman’s terms, I don’t believe that a novelist is just as qualified as an international policy expert. Yes, a novelist can record visceral sensation, describe details, and steer us into his particular point of view. But this does not mean she is the right person to advise a world leader on matters of great import. There are very good reasons why Obama will likely not be filling up his Cabinet with novelists, although this didn’t stop him from asking Toni Morrison for an endorsement.
- George! Goodnight, very yellow moon?
- Is literary theory too abstruse?
- I am equally suspicious of the claim that Hitchcock only got laid once.
- GraphicNovelReporter.com? Bit of a URL mouthful there, but it’s good to see graphic novels taken more seriously. (via Ready Steady)
- GOP implosion has never been more fun to watch. (via Erin O’Brien)
- Transforming novels into video games. Related: Tom Bissell’s New Yorker piece. (First link via Athitakis)
- Roundup turning into sentence frags. Retreat! Retreat!
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
While novelists are good at explaining things, they don’t necessarily explain useful things.