Recommended Reading: Jessica Contrera’s mesmerizing account of a shuttered Waffle House in Bloomington, Indiana. I promise you. This is worth your time.
Bud Powell Says “Goodbye”
Tuesday New Release Day: Sorokin, Perec, O’Nan
Out this week is Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. Coinciding with that release, NYRB Classics is putting out Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is now on shelves, as is Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone, in which he revisits the Maxwell family from his 2002 book Wish You Were Here.
Doug Rickard’s Google Photography
Photographer Doug Rickard employs an interesting technique for his “A New American Picture” series: Google Street View. Check out the shots he took while he “virtually [drove] the unseen and overlooked roads of America, to find bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned.”
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Diary of International Pynchon Week
At n+1, Nick Holdstock’s diary of International Pynchon Week, held in Lublin, Poland: “The conference room looked like the United Nations as depicted in ’60s spy movies … on the pad of the man to my left there were no notes, just a drawing of a cat wearing a shirt and tie.”
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The Day After Hun’s Day
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Magical Listening
At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion’s Salvador and finds that it remains “immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror.”
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Down, Set, Read
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck is the NFL’s unofficial librarian. According to his teammates, Luck is a voracious reader who regularly recommends books in the locker room. The genre is unimportant; Luck reads everything from books on concrete architecture to Love Life by Rob Lowe. Where is the Football Book Club when you need them?
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Olivia Laing Conjures Up Complicated and Difficult People
Olivia Laing discusses her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, and why she chose the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich as its central figure.
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Down On Cannery Row
“I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all — the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable — how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born.” John Steinbeck, American literary titan and author of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly knew a thing or two about creativity.
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Was just reading this article and musing about its relation to some of the comments on the Millions’ recent article on “John The Posthumous” by Jason Schwartz. The Millions comments raised some interesting questions about complex and simple style.
When I think about a complex, intricately detailed writing style, it bring to mind “My Name Is Red” by Orhan Pamuk. The style is such a perfect match for the setting – the 16th-century Ottoman Empire, and the lead character – a master miniaturist and illuminator of books. The novel is stuffed full of exotic tidbits -figurative art and Islam, tricky marital law issues, weird fantasies. I loved the novel and now pine to visit Istanbul.
In contrast, Ms. Contrera’s story is built up of deceptively simple observations, in a plain “Midwestern” style, that coalesce to creative a massive emotional impact. The style made me think of flat Indiana roads and sunshine.
I loved both pieces, and found the choice of style perfect for the story told. As my buddy Randy at the Y security desk says regularly, “It’s all good!”
Beautiful piece. Visits to that Waffle House were a cornerstone of my 4 years in Bloomington.