Edmond Caldwell, a longtime Millions commenter and member of the golden age of lit blogging, has passed away. Caldwell was the founder of The Chagall Position and Contra James Wood. Read a tribute to Caldwell by his friends Boyd Nielson and Joseph G. Ramsey at Dispatches, here.
A Worthy Send-Off
Concealing Horrors
“According to David Means and his debut novel, Hystopia, [classic war novels] aren’t simply about confronting the horrors of war, but also about concealing them, hiding them under a layer of rationalizations and wishful thinking that often simplifies their lawless anarchy and finds sense, meaning and purpose where there’s little.” Over at Electric Lit, Simon Chandler reviews David Means’s Hystopia.
Much Better Than Downton Abbey, I Promise.
When you woke up this morning, did you say to yourself, “I wish I could listen to a bunch of lectures from the University of Texas’ British Studies curriculum?” If so, you’re in luck.
Appearing Elsewhere
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
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Poet Claudia Rankine Narrates the S. Bronx
The L Magazine features an interview with poet/multi-genre artist Claudia Rankine, whose performance piece The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue — a Rankine-written-and-recorded narrative that accompanies a bus ride through the South Bronx — will run for two months beginning Labor Day Weekend.
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Beware the Potterverse
In case you missed it: JK Rowling just released a new Harry Potter short story on her own promotional website. Before you get too excited: the New Republic is less than sanguine, calling it “a marketing scam.” (Code for: not very good writing?) Which is not going to keep me from reading it anyway. Readers with more restraint might note that “You don’t have to be a Barthesian grad student to chafe at Rowling’s impulse to clarify the words on the page.” (Pair with our discussion of fan fiction and the afterlife of literature.)
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Weekend Links
This past week at the LBC was a lot of fun. We discussed the book I nominated, The Cottagers by Marshall Klimasewiski. If you missed it, you should check it out, particularly Friday’s podcast which includes an appearance by yours truly.In other podcast news, Ed, who is an accomplished podcaster, tried and failed to interview Marisha Pessl, author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, for his show. Callie also had some thoughts on Pessl, as did CAAF.Fresh off of declaring that the typical litblogger is “some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute,” Richard Ford will see his Bascombe trilogy turned into an HBO mini-series (via Scott). Litblogger Noah gave Ford’s Lay of the Land a good review last year, but for all Ford knows, Noah was writing from here.Scott looks at Dave Eggers’ What is the What and ponders how atrocity is portrayed in fiction.
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Book-Related Internet Graphics
Today in book-related graphics: The Arts Shelf has created an infographic measuring famous literature by word count, and The New York Times provides a handy, illustrated guide to any writers’ retreat, complete with authors’ cloisters and an “emergency idea generator.”
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Carolyn:
Thanks for mentioning EC (and Boyd and Joe’s worthy tribute)! This is just to point out that, far more than being a blogger, EC was a dedicated and deeply-educated writer who had lots of short stories out there, as well as having had a well-reviewed novel, Human Wishes/ Enemy Combatant, print-published in 2012. To quote Jacob Bacharach, at HuffPo (from a piece called “All Good Books are Weird Books”):
“And then there’s my recent favorite, a small-press novel called Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant by Edmond Caldwell, which manages to combine the surreal landscapes of airport hotels with a living Matryoshka doll with a wrenching account of the massacre of Lydda in the 1948 Palestine War with a rambunctious conspiracy to abduct and replace James Wood—yes, that James Wood—with a subversive double.”
Edmond had another novel to his credit, as well, unpublished, that I hear was also quite wonderful. Here’s to hoping that both books find a new life in the coming years. Once in a blue moon quality does (or should), briefly, rise to the top…