This Saturday, literary experts will congregate upon Salinas to discuss one of the important questions of our time: Would Steinbeck vote for Kerry or Bush?
What next? Herman Melville — did he like Ike or was he madly for Adlai? Thoreau – liability under the Patriot Act? Would Mark Twain approve of the Diebold voting machines?
The gang at the Globe has issued a new disclaimer in their programs, suggesting that Shakespeare’s work was attributed to somebody else. If it’s Mary Sidney Herbert, the case that Newsweek put forth on June 28 (through Sidney expert Robin Williams) is weak:
“It would explain why Shakespeare wrote love sonnets to a younger man.” Shakespeare didn’t swing both ways? Shakespeare didn’t get inside the head of another character to get at deeper feelings? I think, with the exception of some of his early work and the hideous Coriolanus, you’d be hard-pressed to nail ol’ Bill as a literal-minded writer.
“It would could clarify why the first compilation of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio of 1623, was dedicated to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery (her sons).” Okay, let’s say that you’re a cash-strapped theatre and one of the best-educated women in England happens to float your operation with her husband. Are you going to be grateful? Are you going to, say, acknowledge that person’s family or friends? Are you going to hope that this spirit of generosity will trickle down to the next generation?
“And it would explain Ben Jonson’s First Folio eulogy to the ‘sweet swan of Avon.'” No, sorry. It’s called waxing poetic about a guy’s hometown.
I’m all for these interesting arguments and speculations, but none of this stuff would hold up in a court of law.
Williams, it should be be noted, was the only Sidney advocate at the July authorship conference.
The Washington Post Weekend looks at the current state of zines (sort of, in pretty skimming, general terms). (Note: The Rowe being quoted here is Chip Rowe, who works for Playboy and wrote a book about zines.)
Rowe summarizes the movement of zines onto the Web thusly: “Fanzines became paper zines became webzines became blogs. That’s where we are now.” But he’s not just being blithe. He sees in the current blog craze something akin to the paper zine craze of the early ’90’s. “The same spirit is there,” Rowe says. “Everybody feels powerless to one degree or another and is looking to get some kind of reaction. They want people to care about what they think. It’s heartening seeing blogs, even if a lot of them will go away as the novelty wears off.”
Breier and Smith, whose Xerography Debt includes a regular column on the history of zines, find the antecedents of Leeking Ink and chickfactor and all of their kin much further back, in the 19th century broadsheets often named Tatler or Spectator and devoted to a wide range of political and literary subject matter, a sudden surge of home publishing made possible by the growing availability of the tabletop printing press.
Some blogs may bear kinship to certain kinds of zines, but I’m thinking that one to one correlation is false and does no kindness to either blogs or zines.
Anyway, the article basically ignores my favorite kind of zines (ha, the kind I co-edit), the print literary ones, in which some extremely vital work is being done. Scott Berg implies there aren’t any editors in zine-ville, which is patently false. (Ask any of the writers that Christopher Rowe and I have requested rewrites from.) He hints that the print zine is over, also falsely patented.
Some links to zines I think are worth your time that Berg didn’t have time to deal with (some of his recs are great, actually, love Leeking Ink) and which are cheaper than a cup of coffee at that green and white place:
Trunk Stories
Electric Velocipede
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (you should be reading this already! and not just for my advice column! also lots of zine reviews on the site!
Alchemy
–And yes, I’ve already linked to Say…, in a moment of crass zine promotion, but we just have little weird internet homes and no real site for the Fortress of Words (I know, I know), so just follow _that_ link and help pay for the reprints of the latest issue we desperately need to have done!
If you have favorites, post them in the comments.
Long live the zine revolution.
AL Kennedy (with Maud), Tanenhaus, (Complete Review taking piss of same), Andrei Codrescu (with Birnbaum), The Art of Not Writing Books, Robert Ferrigno (no relation to Lou) at Sarah’s, Stephen King and “artistic merit,” China Mieville and economics, Wold Newton, M. Night rips off M. Peterson Haddix, new Pavarotti tell-all, John Strelecky claims world’s fastest book sales, bidding war for Obama book, classic Indian lit into new media, A. Wilson wins Trib lifetime achievement, famed Hardy tryst tower to be moved, leading lit agency enters picture biz, Scot lot fund denies funds to preserve MS (x many), street lit biatch, Gloria Emerson passed away, yet another comics deserve more respect piece, Alex Beam checks out DFW Gourmet piece.
Alas, a bit of research shows that Herr Hamsun did indeed suffer from a case of Nazism. Worse, if that’s possible, he said and did things that rocket him way past “casual flirtation”–like meeting with Joseph Goebbels and then sending Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift:
Hamsun’s loyalty to the National Socialist New Order in Europe was well appreciated in Berlin, and in May 1943 Hamsun and his wife were invited to visit Joseph Goebbels, a devoted fan of the writer. Both men were deeply moved by the meeting, and Hamsun was so affected that he sent Goebbels the medal which he had received for winning the Nobel Prize for idealistic literature in 1920, writing that he knew of no statesman who had so idealistically written and preached the cause of Europe. Goebbels in return considered the meeting to have been one of the most precious encounters of his life and wrote touchingly in his diary: “May fate permit the great poet to live to see us win victory! If anybody deserved it because of a high-minded espousal of our cause even under the most difficult circumstances, it is he.” The following month Hamsun spoke at a conference in Vienna organized to protest against the destruction of European cultural treasures by the sadistic Allied terror-bombing raids. He praised Hitler as a crusader and a reformer who would create a new age and a new life. Then, three days later, on June 26, 1943, his loyalty was rewarded with a personal and highly emotional meeting with Hitler at the Berghof. As he left, the 84 year-old Hamsun told an adjutant to pass on one last message to his Leader: “Tell Adolf Hitler: we believe in you.”
Fucking hell. This doesn’t quite answer the question of whether I should read Hamsun or not, but to say it dampens my enthusiasm (in advance) would be an understatement.