At 74, Clive James is a remarkably prolific poet, one who’s working hard to finish or publish three books in the next year alone. He spoke with Douglas Murray of The Spectator about his unflagging energy. “At the moment, I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t,” he says. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on James’s book Cultural Amnesia.
Greatly Exaggerated
Protest? I Would Prefer Not To.
In October 2011, Hannah Gersen convincingly argued that the Occupy Wall Street protests bore more than a few similarities to Bartleby, The Scrivener. Now, amid the political demonstrations going on throughout Turkey, Millions contributor Kaya Genç draws a similar parallel between Istanbul’s “Standing Man” and Herman Melville’s famous protagonist.
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New Miranda July Work on the Way
Welcome news for Miranda July fans: she tweeted this week that she’s finished work on her debut novel, The First Bad Man. The book will publish in January 2015.
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“The Percy Jackson Problem”
“Riordan’s books prompt an uneasy interrogation of the premise underlying the ‘so long as they’re reading’ side of the debate—at least among those of us who want to share Neil Gaiman’s optimistic view that all reading is good reading, and yet find ourselves by disposition closer to the Tim Parks end of the spectrum, worried that those books on our children’s shelves that offer easy gratification are crowding out the different pleasures that may be offered by less grabby volumes.” In an essay for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead considers questions about what children should be reading through the lens of the Percy Jackson series.
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The S Monster
ICYMI, J.J. Abrams (of Lost and Star Trek fame) will release a novel — conceived by Abrams and written by Doug Dorst — in October with the enigmatic title of S. Last month, he released the first half of a teaser trailer; this week, he released the second half.
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Reality Slips
“I sensed myself hurtling into the reality of the film, and leaving my own behind.” Esme Weijun Wang writes on the slippage of reality in films and schizoaffective disorder.
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Fully Secure
Recommended Viewing: Atlas Obscura’s gallery of libraries in which books are chained to the shelves. (h/t The Hairpin)
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Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
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