In Johns Hopkins Magazine, a remembrance of the Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man Symposium, which brought together Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others. About Derrida, Professor Richard Macksey (whose library you may have seen) recalls: “I’m not sure we were clear about where this guy was going.”
A Memory, Deconstructed
Lorin Stein on Grace Paley, Elliot Gould, and philo-semi-Semitism
Jewcy offers a wide-ranging and formidably erudite interview with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.
●
●
Blind Spots
Penny Perkins interviews Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty author Ramona Ausubel at The Rumpus. “I realized that this book I was writing about money had to be about race and it had to be about class and it had to be about privilege, and which of those things we are able to see and which we are blind to.” Pair with Ausubel’s writing at The Millions.
Appearing Elsewhere
My essay on Zadie Foster Franzenides and the current state of literary aesthetics is in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine.
Writing Mirrors
“Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition.” Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Nabokov Speech Published in English for the First Time
In 1925 Nabokov delivered a colorful talk on boxing to a circle of Russian émigrés living in Berlin. Yesterday, that pugnacious passage was published for the first time in English.
●
●
Anonymous Authors
Recommended Reading: Art Winslow asks, “did Thomas Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?”
●
●