February 2007

  • The Cello
    • by Bud Parr on 02/08/07 (1 comments)

On Deck +

Contributors +

Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, a collection of essays edited by Joseph Tabbi Rone Shavers is due out this month (via the Gaddis discussion group). 

comment William Gaddis

Glyn Maxwell, whom I admired in a previous post, writes about poetry instead of poets. That’s why I always read him when I see his name. Here’s a quote from his recent Guardian piece on Derek Walcott’s latest book:



To write in received forms is not to render verse doggedly metric or singsong (to the modern ear that’s the province of light verse, or performance poetry); it is to carry in the new line the echo of the old. Just as the living creature brings nothing but the past to each moment, the poet brings nothing but poetry’s past to the white space he has to cross to stay alive.

comment Glyn Maxwell

I’m re-reading Kundera’s The Art of the Novel before The Curtain, his latest essay on the same topic to see how his thinking might have changed in the 20 or so years between the two. If nothing else his essays are an approach to his novels, but they also get you thinking about books you haven’t yet read. In my case, Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, which I picked up when in my Gaddis daze and have been afraid of cracking. Why? Because I’ve read about 1/3 of Broch’s The Death of Virgil, which is beautiful prose poem of a novel, but I can only manage a handful of pages at a time.

As intense as The Departed is (Scorsese’s best film since Mean Streets & Taxi Driver [although Bringing Out the Dead was great too]), Van Morrison’s rendition of Comfortably Numb with Roger Waters is a keeper, particularly since I’ve been hungry for some Morrison and didn’t like his country album. He recorded Comfortably Numb at the Berlin Wall in 1990, but I’d never heard it before.



You can’t download the song alone on iTunes from the soundtrack, but you can from his just released album The Movie Hits, which is otherwise a rehash of old music, although some welcome live recordings.

My client Min Jin Lee told me about Narrative Magazine today (where she won the 2004 Narrative Prize). Not sure how I missed it, but it looks like a great journal. Tons of familiar names (and plenty of not-so familiar too) and it’s all free.

One movement I was a member of before I knew it! The Slow Reading Movement. See Lindsay Waters’ article in The Chronicle for Higher Education. There’s more to the piece than this, but I particularly liked this:



“The role of literature is to mess with time, to establish its own time, its own rhythm. A new agenda for literary studies should open up the time of reading, just as it opens up how the writer establishes his or her rhythm. Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words.”

Dirda on Kundera

“In an age of the increasingly ephemeral, Kundera has long championed the permanence of art and the Flaubertian ideal of making every word count. A true novelist, he proclaims, should aim at nothing less than to build ‘an indestructible castle of the unforgettable’”

on In the Shape of a Boar Dimitri writes at the Now What blog:

“The reason I’m writing this piece on Norfolk is not to give a review of the novel, though I will discuss it mostly, but to point to Norfolk as a writer who adroitly pulled the wool over the eyes of publishing/marketing/reviewing world.”



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