Nabokov once claimed “there is no reading, only rereading.” In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks pursues the “key to rereading,” taking The Waste Land and Mrs. Dalloway as his test cases.
Why Reread?
The Return of the (Poet) King
“Grim was the world and grey last night / The moon and stars were fled.” It looks like even J.R.R. Tolkien might have been a an angsty teen. Two previously unseen poems by the legendary author have been found in a forgotten annual printed by a small primary school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1936. For another Tolkien-related blast from the past, here is W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings series.
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“Hemingway, a perfervid admirer of ‘grace under pressure.’”
Here’s a treat for all you literary legal buffs. A judge in the Middle District of Florida denied a request for a continuance in a murder-for-hire trial. But wait, it gets better. The defense attorney, Frank Louderback, is a perennial contestant in Hemingway Look-alike Society’s annual Ernest Hemingway Look-alike Contest, held in Key West each year, and the purpose of Louderback’s continuance was so he could travel to the Conch Republic for the competition. The judge denied the order by citing Big Papa himself. (via Nate Harris)
Reading by Halves
Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel wonders “What’s Wrong with Only Reading Half a Book?” Pair with our own Sonya Chung‘s essay on her list of unfinished reads and the art of “breaking up with books.”
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Double Shot of #LitBeat
This week we posted two new #LitBeat features on our Tumblr. In one piece, Greg Cwik roamed Brooklyn as part of The Morley Walk, a tour organized by Melville House’s Dustin Kurtz in order to bring attention to Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop. In another, Michael Spinelli reports on a conversation between Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Sam Lipsyte.
Public Access Poetry
In 1977-1978, a public access TV show called Public Access Poetry featured leading poets from across the country (Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, John Yau, Brad Gooch). Thirty-one episodes are now online, but the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s is seeking funding to post the remaining fifteen reels.
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Curiosities: Astronaut Food
Jonathan Evison talks with independent publicist Lauren Cerand about promoting books.Kindle shenanigans: “This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers.”Marking the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kottke puts together a huge post of photos, videos, and links in commemoration.Our recent item rounded up all the “big” books coming out in the latter half of the year. PW alerts readers to “10 promising fiction debuts” coming this fall.Jacket Copy concludes its Pomo Month with an annotated list of “61 essential postmodern reads.”New uses for card catalogs. (via)The second issue of online literary journal The Critical Flame has arrived.Mark Sarvas offers a four-part interview with Joseph O’Neill. “I think I start with one idea. In Netherland, it was cricket in New York. Then there is an accumulation of sentences, and often just single words. Words that interest me. And I sort of build it up like a poem.”Amazon names the “Best Books of the Year… So Far.”
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In/sane
If you’re not already a fan of Will Self, his new book, Shark, may not be the best place to start. As Walker Rutter-Bowman points out, the book dispatches with many of the conventions of modern writing, including line breaks, paragraphs and dialogue tags. But it’s still an effort worthy of its author, he writes: “Here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely renders mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.”