Current and Recent Reading

 

altimage I started writing about Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rink for this post and got carried away because it was turning into a book review and I haven’t even finished it. So I chucked that, but I’ll leave you with this: The structure is, at least superficially, Roshomon-like, and the characters are firmly in Bolaño territory: writers and ne’er-do-wells. There’s a crime. You can read what my friend A.M. Correa has to say about it and she links to some other articles as well.

I’m also reading Stephen Burt’s Close Calls With Nonsense, subtitled Reading New Poetry, but put more specifically in the title chapter, “How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry.” While I’m repelled by anything that begins with “How to…” I like Burt’s writing very much because he’s not condescending, and he avoids the great crime of most poetry critics, pretending to know that he knows everything. He’s much more focused on championing new poetry than proving that he’s smart (which, in turn, proves it anyway). I love reading poetry criticism, but so much of it is about the critic and not the poetry, so Burt is a rare find and a candidate for the Chekhov’s Mistress Ardor Award.

Paul Auster Interview Video

 

Paul Auster fans probably know already that his next novel, Invisible is coming out this fall. Here’s an interview with Auster from his home in Brooklyn by Granta’s editor John Freeman. There’s an extract from the book in the latest issue of Granta. It’s a fun conversation about writing as well as Auster’s novel.

Granta Paul Auster Interview from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Hat’s Off to Bruce Adolphe

 

Wow, this is really great. My friend Bruce Adolphe, whom, sadly, we’ve not seen much of since the twins were born (which is why I’m only just seeing this), wrote what sounds like, based on Tommasini’s report in the New York Times a fantastic piece of music “inspired by the research and writings of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.” In his article Tommasini writes “Most composers would shy away from depicting the evolution of consciousness…Mr. Adolphe, who had already written two works based on Mr. Damasio’s writings, plunged right in.”

He goes on to say “The result was ‘Self Comes to Mind,’ a 30-minute work for cello and two percussionists, with video imagery based on brain scans and with texts by Mr. Damasio. The piece had its premiere on Sunday night at the American Museum of Natural History. The 900-seat LeFrak Theater was packed for the event, which included an hourlong discussion with the collaborators.”

Congratulations, Bruce!

You can listen to this podcast with Bruce on the Here on Earth (coincidentally, the same show that I was supposed to be on this week) show from WPR.

Steve Lehman

 

Just discovered Steve Lehman today thanks to Elyssa East. Yes, it’s true I’ve spent most of my music listening energy the last few years trying to find stuff palatable to everyone in my family (although kids will listen to more crazy stuff than most give them credit for). But it’s nice, in a way, to know that I was actually missing something. Here’s a video from the Pi Recordings Website (where you’ll find lots of great music/vids, including Tom Waits’ guitarist Marc Ribot)

Muldoon on Colbert

 

Paul Muldoon is unique among poets. First, he can “successfully” write poems about rock singers he has known (sadly, Warren Zevon) and secondly, he has the sense of humor to go through the verbal gauntlet that is the Colbert report. Here’s the very funny video (via, aptly named for this video, Close Calls with Nonesense):

The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Paul Muldoon
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorMark Sanford

Life on Mars, by Jean Thompson

 

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and I are exactly the same age, and though surely I must have spent some years growing up and learning to read, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know and love these stories. This may be a mild surprise for anybody who knows my own fiction; my territory is not science fiction or any sort of speculative writing. I’m pretty much a hopeless realist and have never felt the least impulse to write about space travel, alien races, or futuristic scenarios. But “The Martian Chronicles” grabbed me and never let go, as it has so many other readers over so many years.

Part of this, of course, is that Bradbury is a first-rate writer of prose, whether he’s describing the idyllic or the nightmarish, the nostalgia of a remembered Earth town (The Third Expedition), or the grim goings-on in Usher II, a kind of murderous Disneyland where censors and book-burners meet their fate at the hands of literary characters. He makes all the right narrative moves, setting scene and playing out action in ways that engage us and keep the story moving, yet also grounding us with gorgeous sensory description. We see the blue canals and glass-like Martian towers, shiver at the ghostly, deserted settlements, feel the heat of the unnatural rocket summer. It’s no accident that Bradbury wrote any number of classic episodes for “The Twilight Zone”, back when television employed actual writers, not just producers of reality TV. He appeals to some of our most common fears: abandonment, isolation, and the suspicion that much of human enterprise is a force bent on exploitation, ruination, and self-destruction. Witness the creepy sadness of the mechanical house in There Will Come Soft Rains, going about its business even after its human inhabitants have been obliterated by nuclear catastrophe.

It’s also reassuring, somehow, that the Martians, as imagined by Bradbury, are so, well, human. or at least, as human as golden-eyed, shape-shifting telepaths can be. By this I mean that their motivations and psychology are recognizable to us. Alien races as imagined by other writers are often more menacing, more in the mechanical-predator-giant insect mode. Bradbury’s Martians resist their invasion and colonization and ultimate extinction in ways that we can understand and sympathize with. Maybe it’s this instinct for empathy that appeals to even such an earthbound writer as myself. And even now that we’ve lived long enough to see the Mars Rover, and the pictures of the actual planet’s surface, it’s hard to let go of the notion that what we’re seeing are the ruins of that elegant, imaginary civilization.

Support Your Indie Press: Read Like a Pig

 

altimage
From my friends at the excellent Two Dollar Radio. Buy it Here

The International Version…

 

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of my weekend reading suggestions is posted at Words Without Borders.

In addition to that I’d add this brief piece at the Christian Science Monitor bridging Twitter and Geoffrey Hill’s poetry:

Hill came to mind today while I reflected on the Internet response to the election crisis in Iran. In the confusion following the contest between incumbent Ahmadinejad and progressive Mousavi, the interconnected world of the social media has played a role whose ultimate force and effect have not yet been revealed. Dissidents in the country have used the Internet to rally the Web to their cause; in the West, users of Twitter and Facebook have flocked to the virtual scene, lending their energy through a confusing blend of cyberwarfare, rumor-mongering, and witness.

And this great bit by Ed Park at the LATimes Jacket Copy Blog that defies tidiness:


Last week, columnist Ed Park reviewed “A Monster’s Notes” by Laurie Sheck. This is his remixed, expanded, deconstructed/reconstructed remake of that review.

I.
“Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads.” — Joyce, “Ulysses”

Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after giving birth to her.

“This is ordinary. I was a body coming out of another body that died. That died because of my body.” — Laurie Sheck, “A Monster’s Notes”

“This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim, nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die.” — “Ulysses”

I don’t know which file contains my review in the form of notes and which contains my notes for the review in the form of notes.

Bloomsday now. Still writing this.

Sources for all of these are the good people of the Twittersphere. Except for this – check out the always excellent Triple Canopy’s pieces on Urbanisms – Model Cities

Have a great weekend!

Trib On Dalkey Archive

 

The Chicago Tribune has a nice piece on Dalkey Archive Press:

In the past, Dalkey was known chiefly for its reprints of books that had gone out of print. But in the past five years, Riker notes, the company has begun to publish more original work, and now about 70 percent of Dalkey’s list is original. “All this good stuff kept coming to us,” he says.

Infinite Summer, Why Not?

 

Next up, Infinite Summer, a reading of Infinite Jest from June 21st to Sept. 22nd with online guides and a discussion forum.

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Such a long time since I have read any Muldoon. I will look for that WZ poem. Thanks.

– genevieve
on “Muldoon on Colbert”

I love Ish (not least for his continued advocacy for children of war around the world) and Open Book TV. And of course Madiba is always great. I think I could have done with fewer mystical echoing flutes-of-sadness though. 

About the ICC: such an important struggle, and so anathema to the idea of American Exceptionalism we are all raised on. That, along with the debate over humanitarian intervention, look to be the defining international issues of our time exactly because they cannot be reduced to simple dichotomies, or even unambiguous moral stances. By which I mean to say I’m looking forward to the film.

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Thanks, Sven. Who knew I’d be blog of the week somewhere, anywhere… Nice to know.

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on “New Words Without Borders: Writing from Pakistan”