Chekhov's Mistress:

“Part of the tension felt right now, perhaps, is that blogging and the internet have allowed for enthusiasm to encroach upon the terrain of criticism at a time when the arts landscape itself seems to be shrinking. Ebert (and Scott in his praise for him), however, provide a useful reminder that audiences perhaps gravitate most towards unique voices that are able to offer both enthusiasm and criticism rather than attempt to demarcate the boundaries between the two.”

- Max Magee

“Paul Theroux is the kind of guy who travels to Malawi in a train and looks out the window and then writes about how the people outside all look very dumb and bored and unhappy and Malawi is an unhappy country… I think it’s utterly uninspiring, both as language and as perception… Günter Grass wrote a book about India, for example. I actually went through the book and counted how often he described shit. There are 289 mentions of shit in this small book. If you’re so obsessed with shit, there’s no need to go to India, just describe your own latrine—that would be just as representative of your neurosis. But if you are claiming to describe something out in the world, that’s another matter.”

- Ilija Trojanow quoted from Pen America 8 on the Pen America blog

“Ashbery – born in 1927 – has gone on writing his poems, and writing them faster than most of us can read them.”

- Stephen Burt in “John Ashbery, a poet for our times” Times Literary Supplement

comment John Ashbery

“Baker pointed out that for every book he has written, he would generally get one third of the way into it before “something goes wrong.” Then, he sets it aside. But he had been working on a book-length history of the Library of Congress, dwelling in particular upon Archibald MacLeish, who was the Librarian of Congress in 1939. MacLeish would go onto become a key propaganda figure during the war. And thus Baker found himself immersed in “an interpretive problem.” He had to understand World War II. So he put aside this project and Human Smoke began to take shape.”

- Ed Champion on Nicholson Baker

“If you find Elbow’s music glum and depressing, you’re missing the point. Anyone who considers Elbow, Radiohead etc in any way miserable needs to spend some time finding the real beauty in this world of ours, for I fear that those folks are taking the whole thing on face value only. Let a little sadness into your lives and see how happy it can make you.”

- Simon Collison on Elbow’s “The Seldom Seen Kid”

“For instance, in the new shop, she’d like to offer tie-in products with books on certain subjects, i.e., yoga mats near the wellness shelf or wooden spoons near the cookbooks.”

- The New York Observer on Sarah McNally’s plans for a new bookstore on the Upper West Side

“Here’s my prediction though: Lots of people will watch this and think—hell, it’s not that hard to put together an internet show that’s at least this good. A bunch of different programs will suddenly come into existence, a few of which are actually quite good. Around the time that we find out that one of these new ones is 10 times more popular than Titlepage there will be a big media backlash against these “amateur” programmers, dismissing internet programs as “not the real thing.” A divisive spat will ensue mimicing the whole bloggers vs. print thing, and readers will be back where they started with nothing worth watching.”

Chad Post on TitlePage.tv

“Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress’ new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It’s taxation without web presentation.”

- Casey Durfee at LibraryThing on the LOC’s

via Three Percent

“It’s a great crib, no doubt, but ‘one of the most prominent critics of our time’ should surely be doing a lot more than writing a kind of student’s guide to the novel.”

– Mark Thwaite on James Wood’s How Fiction Works

“By the time I reached the ending…I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking…and thinking…

Dissertations could be written about this novel.”

- amcorrea on Steve Erickson’s Zeroville

“MFA programs spend a lot of time going on about pedigree. It’s how they reward their students, it’s how they laud their faculty, it’s how they judge their applicants. But education, no matter how important it is to educators, doesn’t seem to impress so much in the outside world.”

Carolyn Kellogg

“We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.”

- Zadie Smith on not finding a story worth of the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition.

“Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.”

– Tom Hodgkinson at the Guardian

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