Photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai, a Yakuza group headquartered on the Kyushu island of Japan. “My mental note to myself,” says Jue, “was ‘once I step foot into their property, anything can happen.’”
Deep In Yakuza Territory
J.M. Coetzee on Philip Roth
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The History of the Blurb
What if Petrarch had blurbed The Divine Comedy, or Shakespeare, “author of Tony Award-winning sensation Hamlet,” had reviewed Don Quixote? Tom Rachman imagines these blurbs and more for The Rumpus, and his piece pairs well with our brief history of the blurb.
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On Rereading
Are rereadings better readings? Nabakov thinks so. But Patricia Spacks, in her new memoir On Rereading grapples with the guilty pleasure.
The Electric Mind, The Atavist
David Carr takes a look at The Atavist, whose team of multimedia gurus has won the attention (and seed funding) of Google founder Eric Schmidt. Of course, the outfit’s also been receiving generous attention for their quality work, too. (I mentioned them a few months ago.) More recently, however, certain scientific circles have fawned over the subject of their story The Electric Mind, which tracks one paralyzed woman and the scientists who developed the BrainGate technology which eventually got her moving… robotically.
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The Humanity of Books
“To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.” Digital pioneer and theorist Jaron Lanier fears that the Internet might be destroying not just literature, but also the middle class.
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Speaking of The New Yorker…
Is just me, or has The New Yorker been resurgent the last few weeks? In addition to the David Grann piece mentioned below, we’ve gotten: Bloomberg, diving, James Wood‘s most cogent essay to date on atheism and belief, and a F-B-P triple play. (That’s Friend to Bilger to Paumgarten, for those keeping score at home.) And I read the fiction for five issues in a row – a personal best. I know they assemble these things far in advance, but it still feels like the Ian Frazier “Siberia” two-parter, eight years in the making, started some kind of conflagration of awesomeness. Thoughts?
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Death, Sex, Money & James McBride
Recommended listening: Death, Sex & Money talks with James McBride, winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction.
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