“What’s the kindest thing you almost did?” You’ll find this sentence by Jonathan Safran Foer on a Chipotle cup next time you eat a burrito there. The fast food restaurant will feature the short stories five authors, including Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Michael Lewis, on its cups, and unlike guacamole, they won’t cost extra. Unsurprisingly, Cormac McCarthy didn’t make a cup.
Burrito Lit
Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
If you’re in New York this weekend, join Belladonna* and Kundiman for a celebration of what would have been the 60th birthday of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar). Nine poets, including Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Sina Queyras, and Anne Waldman, will perform a staged reading from Dictee, Cha’s best known work. There will be birthday cake, projected images, scholarly contextualization, and other surprises. Saturday March 5, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2pm.
“Would we also just weep and walk away?”
In an effort to get consumers to think more consciously about the “human cost” of commercial sugar production, artist Kara Walker has installed “Subtlety,” a large-scale public sculpture in Brooklyn’s iconic Domino Sugar Factory. Meanwhile, Edwidge Danticat explores contemporary labor conditions in the Dominican Republic’s cane fields.
New Contest from Kirkus Reviews
To celebrate the 80th birthday of Kirkus Reviews, the editorial staff is holding a contest in which the grand prize winner gets a literary tour of New York City. This includes “two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.”
Rising to the Surface
“In real life, we are often so bound by social convention, but at the same time we all have secret, inexplicable aspects of ourselves. The parts that nobody else sees. In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.” Salon interviews Laura van den Berg about her new novel, Find Me, which we covered in our Great 2015 Book Preview.
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
The Art of Hyping
Chad Harbach‘s The Art of Fielding is ubiquitous. We tapped it in our Second Half of 2011 Preview. n+1 bundled it with year-long subscriptions. The Awl interviewed the author. The New Yorker‘s Book Club picked it as their September book. It was reviewed in The New York Times. Now Keith Gessen‘s expanded his Vanity Fair piece on the novel’s development into a standalone e-book. In light of all this hype, McNally Jackson’s Tumblr provides a poignant list of baseball puns for reviewers to start avoiding.
●
●
Translating the Untranslatable
Recommended Reading: In which a great translator takes on a nearly impossible project: “Schmidt violates the rules of orthography and punctuation throughout the book, and its sprawling conversations cover James Joyce, trees, magic, the moon, and Xerxes, among many other things. After getting Zettel’s Traum out of his system, Schmidt would go on to write his best works. ‘I had to write it,’ he said. ‘And such a book had to be written sometime.'”
●
●
Gary Shteyngart Becomes A Glasshole
Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is now a reality. He got to try Google Glass and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker. “When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.”
Well, this is it, folks. This is the crowning achievement in pretentiousness. Many contemporary practitioners of “literary fiction” have offered their contributions. But Jonny Saffron is King. He is The One True A-Hole. For years I was convinced nothing would top him reducing 9/11 into a cute flip book (for dramatic effect!). How naive I was. Jonny Saffron broke free from the shackles of fiction and ascended to the heights of non-fictive moral superiority with his masturbatory shame-lecture about lunch. This was, and still is, pretentiousness’ magnum opus.
But this article tops it all. Everything Jonny Saffron says in this article – every sentence, practically every word – is utterly ridiculous. Just start at the beginning. Jonny Saffron “wanted to die from frustration” because he couldn’t multitask while eating? While this is probably his subtle way of announcing that he is so literary and so serious that he spends every second of his day “engaging with texts”, I also feel terribly sorry for the maitre d’ who must keep him entertained when he has a craving for tempeh in a non-“fast casual” setting.
There is more, so much more. But every now and then, Jonny Saffron will weave a paragraph of such astounding absurdity, such self-congratulatory emptiness, such face-punchable gas-baggery, that he manages to re-calibrate the limits of pretentious possibility:
“..what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”
Cull this over for a minute. He is saying, with masterful concision, that:
1. Chipotle’s clientele is extremely diverse
2. His writing is good
3. Most people have access to Chipotle but not a library
4. Most people who can afford 8-dollar burritos can’t afford to buy books
5. He is doing this for the good of democracy
6. He is good for doing this
I am in awe.