Bibliophile

James Franco, whose Faulkner adaptation for the big-screen, "As I Lay Dying," is playing at Cannes, discusses his love of Faulkner and his ability to handle multiple projects at once.

...and sending good wishes and warm thoughts to anyone affected by this devastating tragedy. I've just been watching the news, and the massive tornado cutting a swath through those communities, and trying to imagine 200mph winds and how terrifying that must have been. I'm hoping America have the U.K. equivalent of Shelterbox and the means for people who have lost everything to create at least a temporary home very quickly. And then the most heart-warming moment of the woman being interviewed on Sky News at the site of her flattened home, and grieving the loss of her dog, at which point out crawled the missing dog from underneath the debris, almost right next to her and into her arms. Take care America, as always at moments like this, we are thinking of you.    

JOURNAL: 5/20/13.Trying a couple of tricky narrative tricks. Don't know if they are going to work.I'm just trying to get the basic plot down. I'm going to need to go back later and add depth.Soon I'll be facing the cold and hunger chapters.How do you portray long periods of time where nothing happens? How do you portray not eating and not moving without being boring? That will be a challenge.Once they try to escape, and once the werewolves start striking, then everything will be easier.So I've got to figure out a trick.Wrote the second Stanton chapter. It was a struggle. I finally added a werewolf element to the chapter, and that gave me enough wordage.I've got one more set-up chapter, which will get us halfway through the book.Then the cold, starving chapters at Truckee Lake. Not sure how I'm going to do those. I feel like I need a couple of chapters of that without the werewolves. Maybe have the werewolf enter the second chapter.How do portray hunger? How do you portray nothing happening but hunger and cold? Then go to Stanton and Reed, and the beginning of the rescue.Then the action scenes to fill out the rest of the book.

From a letter (6 III 1909) of Innokenty Annensky (classicist, poet, and much-loved teacher) to Max Voloshin:But do many understand what the word is among us? [...] You know, recently, even among us, oh! how many there are who fuss over the word and are even prepared to speak about its cult. But they do not understand that the most frightening and powerful word ? the most enigmatic ? is perhaps just the everyday word.(Russian below the cut, from here.) On December 13, 1909, Annensky died from a heart attack at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station on his way home from work; Natalia Murray writes (The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde: The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin, p. 14): "It was almost certainly triggered by discovering the non-inclusion of his poems in the first issue of one of the most fashionable journals of the time, Apollon." You can care too much about the word.Continue reading "THE FRIGHTENING EVERYDAY WORD."

Managing Stress: From Morning to Night Time-Life Books 1987 Mary: I thought this title would be an excellent kickoff to our new and improved site. Hopefully, you will notice that pictures are loading faster. Both of us will continue to tweek this  as we go along. We appreciate your patience for the last few days. Special shout out to my partner-in-crime, Holly, who spent the last few days slaving over our website, while I ate and drank my way through New Orleans. (Btw, my stress is totally busted!) Submitter: We pulled this book from the shelves of a high school public library when looking for books on stress and relaxation. The pictures made us burst out laughing. My personal favorites include the man clutching a cork in his mouth (where did the cork come from? His liquid lunch?) for “jaw relaxation” and the lady slumped over at her desk who appears to be looking up her own skirt. Holly: The advice and the exercises are probably fine, but it’s sooooo 1980s! Remember these stress busters? Relax! Chicken System Neurotic Hanging Out

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Was a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin. Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes. Petrushevskaya’s previous collection published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s 2009 best books list. Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review: This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: “A Murky Fate”; “Hallelujah, Family!”; “My Little One”; and “A Happy Ending.” But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better. In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.” “The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.” For the rest of the review, go here.

The Human Figure, John Vanderpoel (F, 20s, tight curls, mustard yellow peacoat, black purse w white spots, L train) http://bit.ly/11I8CQ3

May 21, 2013 Fisherman's House on a Lake near NurembergC.1496Albrecht Dürer21 May 1471 - 6 April 1528 _______________________ Argument with Myself Mike Jay reviews Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves. Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. (....) For the long remainder of his life Henry was blandly unaware of his own story. He would readily volunteer that he had ‘a lot of trouble remembering things’; if pressed, he might speculate that ‘I have possibly had an operation or something.’ His short span of consciousness led to repetitive behaviour – making the same observation repeatedly, or mechanically eating two lunches in a row – but his conversation was characterised by a gentle wit and quizzical, punning exchanges that seemed to test every statement for possible meanings. (When Corkin commented on Henry’s love of crosswords by dubbing him ‘the puzzle king’, he responded: ‘I’m puzzling!’) He had occasional episodes of frustration, anger or panic, but was usually good-natured and accepting of the scene around him. In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time’, though Corkin also wonders whether his lack of anxiety and emotional churn might have been related to the partial loss of his amygdala....(more) _______________________ Conrad Felixmüller _______________________ The U.S. as a party-state Adam KotskoAn und für sich ... Interpreting the party-state phenomenon through liberal democratic norms, the “totalitarian” analysis decides that since something like civil society or the private sphere no longer has the desired autonomy, we can only conclude that the state, as the only other available center of power, is over-dominant. This is a profound misreading of the situation, however, as Foucault points out in Birth of Biopolitics. The problem in party-states is not that the formal state structures are too strong, but that they’re too weak to restrain the party-movement that instrumentalizes them....(more) _______________________ Corruption StudyStudy of Changing SocietiesVolume 1'6 _______________________ Men above the World (Epitaph for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht)1919Conrad Felixmüller (21 May 1897 - 24 March 1977) _______________________ Singin

Readers of this blog know that Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent is a story featuring a boy named William, a child of Bush Hill and Baldwin Locomotive Works, the brother to a young man murdered by a cop. William has lived in my imagination for many years. He was a primary character (but not the primary character) in my Centennial Philadelphia novel, Dangerous Neighbors. He rescues lost animals for a living. He matters to me. Earlier today, I discovered that my friend Ed Goldberg, a librarian in the New York system, put Dr. Radway and Dangerous Neighbors side by side in a review. I love that he did this. I learned from his study. I'm deeply appreciative. Ed's entire report can be found here, on his lovely blog, 2HeadsTogether. He ends his musings like this: What both books do so well is describe one city, Philadelphia of the 1870s, although two different worlds. Both books delve into their main characters, William and Katherine, making them come alive. And both books use language as only Beth Kephart uses language. It was a luxury reading the books one after the other, because it highlights the contrasts that otherwise would have been hidden. So, Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent and then Dangerous Neighbors. The one-two punch in books. Thank you, Mr. Ed. And thank you, Elizabeth Mosier, for the extraordinary note you wrote to me after you read the book through. No one can ever know just how much words like these matter to an author—especially in the case of this particular book.

As I've mentioned in a few posts here and there, I've been slowly reading an ARC of Andrea Barrett's upcoming story collection Archangel. Her fans are going to adore this; it's everything you expect from Barrett and more - a truly fabulous set of stories. I love it. The final story is "Archangel" and includes the main character from the earlier story "The Experiment", now all grown up and fighting in WWI. It's 1919 in "Archangel" and although the war is over, for these men it continues in Russia, where they are assigned to The Polar Bear Expedition and bizarrely, stuck in the Russian Civil War. I have never heard about this force which is pretty stunning as I heavily studied US military history in college (it was the main focus of my history degree) and I've read a ton on WWI. (It seems like I'm always finding out more of history that I've missed. So frustrating!) Barrett does amazing stuff with the setting and characters and brings alive all the confusion and fear of this war-after-a-war where nobody has any idea what is going on. Because this is Barrett there is also a second character, a woman, who is an x-ray technician. The science history of x-rays blends into military history as if they were always meant to be, and readers fall in love with these two people so far from home and so uncertain as to why they are there and what will become of them in that miserable place. You will read "Archangel" and hate war all over again. It's sublime - brittle and sharp and slices your heart. I ripped me apart a bit, this story, and the final paragraphs were worthy of a Wilfred Owen poem. I can't wait until you all read this book - I just can't wait. [Post pic: En route to Archangel, a group of 339th Infantry Regiment doughboys pose with their newly issued M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifles. From the Army Sustainment Bulletin.]