“My scant respect for the trade to which I belong (from the most ancient of academicians to the most youthful of libelists) derives from a childhood home in which I grew used to mistreating and misusing almost all the seminal texts from the history of culture.” Javier Marias on the dangers of growing up with too many books.
Too Many Books
The Opposite of Slouching
“Aspiring journalists tend to worship at the altar of Joan Didion,” writes Heather Havrilesky (who some of you may know as Polly) in the latest issue of Bookforum. The fact that so many writers look up to Didion as an example necessitates that the lit world find at least one offbeat alternative. In Havrilesky's eyes, that alternative is obvious: the late Nora Ephron was the anti-Didion, she argues.
●
●
DFW Interview from Russia
The NYRB blog unearths a 2006 interview with David Foster Wallace by a Russian journalist. "I will probably at some point finish a novel. Whether it will be good enough to publish, I don’t know."
●
●
Boy, Girl, Book?
Is the practice of using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, in need of an overhaul? Stephanie Feldman for Electric Literature has some strong opinions on the subject. Motherhood on the brain, now? Check out this moving essay for The Millions on mothers and sons by Rachel Basch.
●
●
A Stake in the Conflict
Reporting on a war in your homeland is tricky business, but in the fifties, Albert Camus (whose collected articles on the Algerian War of Independence are now available in book form) managed, in spite of his investment in the conflict, to get it right.
Does Hollywood Screw Up Science Fiction?
“Look. There are are only two truly great science fiction movies. The first is Stanley Kubrick's 2001...The second is Blade Runner...You may disagree with this statement. You would be wrong. Let's move on.” Damien Walter at Guardian accuses Hollywood of screwing up science fiction.
●
●
War and Peace and the Gita
Recommended reading: The New York Review of Books reviews at Richard Davis's The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography and the way centuries of politics can alter our interpretations of religious texts.
Elephant’s Memory
Over at Aeon, Alana Massey writes about memory and how the internet archives personal data. In her own words, “Because the archiving technology captures only snapshots of a site at a given time, results might not be an exact replica of the site as it was. As I learned from the fragments of our site, things such as embedded media might be missing and scripts are unlikely to work. After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory.”
●
●
RIP Elizabeth Jane Howard
British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard has died at the age of 90. She was famous for The Cazalet Chronicles and her literary love affairs with Kingsley Amis (one of her three husbands), Cecil Day-Lewis, and Arthur Koestler. Despite that her writing career spanned 60 years, she admitted that she found writing frightening in a recent interview. "You’ve got to be pretty nervous about the challenge, the blank page – anything could be on it, it could be crap or it could be wonderful."