Newsweek Senior Writer (and Millions contributor) Alexander Nazaryan has a new interview with William T. Vollmann up on Newsweek’s website. To start things off right, he reports that if Vollman were to win the Nobel Prize, he’d enjoy giving a decent chunk of the prize money to prostitutes.
America Central
Cheering Up the Country
●
●
Revisiting the Archive
Recommended Listening: Esquire has a new podcast on classic stories from their archive. The latest installment features Nick Flynn on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, which first appeared in the magazine in 1936.
Stephen King Next Week and Next Year
With Stephen King's latest, 11/22/63, a week away, his new Dark Tower novel The Wind Through the Keyhole, now has a publication date: April 24, 2012.
●
●
You Come at Nabokov, You Best Not Miss
It is well known that Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson had one of the more visible falling outs in literary history over the former’s English-language Eugene Onegin translation, and indeed the history of that relationship’s souring is fascinating. But even still, it’s extremely interesting to read Nabokov’s nine-page “Reply” to Wilson’s “adverse criticism.” If nothing else, one has to wonder what Wilson was thinking when he brought a knife to a gun fight.
●
●
3 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Whitman on Poe
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” - Walt Whitman on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance, circa 1880.
Pricey Pads
A real estate blog has calculated the approximate value of Hogwarts, and you might be surprised to learn that it’s worth only a fraction of a real life abode in Mumbai, and only about three times more than one in Orlando.
Put on Your Thinking/Dunce Cap
At Slate, David Wolf reviews a new biography of Rene Descartes, who he claims has developed a reputation as the philosophy world’s favorite punching bag.
●
●
Two Strangers
“Werner isn’t surprised to pass the entrance exams easily. He’s more nonplused to find his head measured with calipers and his hair whiter than any of the 60-odd shades of blond on the examiners’ charts. It goes without saying that his eyes are also rated for their shade of blue.” Janet Maslin reviews Anthony Doerr’s new novel.
●
●
Awesome. Think of all the Thai girls he can buy from their dads if he wins! [see reference by Alexander Nazaryan in interview cited above]
But hey, even if he doesn’t win, there’s always lighting out to Kyrgyzstan and doing a bridal “hit and run.” You don’t even need cash for that. Maybe just a club. And some Tide for the bloody sheets. (See sidebar “top article” reference next to interview cited above, and related tweets)
Just one more item re interview and his included pix.
Re Vollman’s drag excursions as “sad old lady Dolores.”
Quote: “So much of the destruction on Earth has been wrought by men. Women are the ones who give life and try to pick up the pieces…. What a great gender they are.”
As Self-Designated Representative of all sad old ladies, I would like to just say, “Thank you, Bill.” (I find my new steam Swiffer very helpful in this work.)
Actually, he/she still looks pretty f*ckable to me, mid- to late 50’s and strangely hot… in a late-Nico kinda way.
Moe Murph
Surprisely Happy “Old Lady”
Washington DC
“I almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really want me to – if they are going to get hurt if I don’t.”
The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 163, William T. Vollmann (Fall 2000)
The jokes just write themselves
http://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/