“Sitting there in my thrift-store jacket and boa with my legs spread, I was a study in cubism: lips mouthing well-bred earnest truisms about postcolonial theory, hand guiding their hand up under my skirt, it was, on a deep level, hilarious.” Chris Kraus writes about working New York’s topless hustle bars at n+1.
“I Was a Study in Cubism”
Tuesday Means New Releases
Sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman sees her debut effort The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them hit shelves today. Also new today is Not Art by Peter Esterhazy who wowed Garth at PEN/World Voices in 2008.
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Dear Jeeves
“The late 1920s found him in Hollywood (‘This place is loathsome’) drowning, stingless, in MGM honey, while doing hack work on a silly Marion Davies vehicle. His descriptions of reptilian studio fauna make for delicious reading.” At The Daily Beast, a look at P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters.
Still Neglected
In 1970 The American Scholar published a list of works that “distinguished men and women” deemed neglected. Now, inspired by a LitHub essay on “10 Great Writers Nobody Reads,” the Scholar‘s editors are revisiting those neglected books to see if anything’s changed. Pair their efforts with Claire Cameron‘s look at the unlikely rise of the once-neglected Stoner.
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….and the joke may just be on you.
Aaron Wiener for Slate on attending a 24-hour long play in Berlin based on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And we thought three to four hours of DFW was a marathon.
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Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer
In a TED Talk, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer works. You can learn “surprising things” from 500 billion words, a string of characters which put together “would stretch from here to the Moon and back ten times over.”
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Please Be Quiet, Please
Recommended Reading: This essay from The Rumpus on total noise and total silence, touching on everyone from Mikhail Zoshchenko to Don DeLillo.
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Breaking Point
One of the better reasons you should read this review of the new book Breakfast with Freud is this quote, in reference to a Lucian Freud painting: “Robert Hughes compared [Francis] Bacon’s face in it to ‘a hand grenade on the point of detonation.’”
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Interesting piece, but I notice that above the title of the article and the author’s name is the word “fiction,” which takes away much of the appeal.