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
at once impressionistic and profound
Rohan Maitzen on Virginia Woolf‘s literary criticism: “What—I can imagine her asking herself, as she writes about other novelists—am I doing, what else can I do, with the novel? Surely figuring this out was always, for her, the underlying project of her criticism.”
Fiction Writers: Soloists or Thieves?
From Lev Grossman’s blog, “A Brief Taxonomy of Writers”: “As far as I can tell there are two kinds of fiction writers: those who read no fiction while they write, and those who constantly read fiction while they write. Let’s have cute names for them. We’ll call them Soloists and Thieves.”
OWS Drummers Quiet Down
Last night at the General Assembly, the working group of drummers, Pulse, in a spirit of conciliation and generosity, brought forward a proposal to limit their drumming from 12 to 2 and 4 to 6 pm only.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
South Africa, 2010
The last of the World Cup qualifying matches wrapped up this week and the final list of qualified teams is in. See the list of the 32 qualified national teams headed for South Africa in 2010 here.
Louise Erdrich: The Paris Review Interview
“By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer… Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.” The Paris Review interviews Louise Erdrich for its Winter issue.
Anne Frank’s Legacy
“Nathan Englander’s characters have invented ‘the Anne Frank game’ whose major question is ‘who would hide you if there were another Holocaust.’ By making this a game, the characters demonstrate their affective distance from the event, but at the same time Englander illustrates that the Holocaust remains a touchstone for the marijuana-smoking, Orthodox Jews who bring the game to their secular Jewish friends.” On the fictional afterlife of Anne Frank.
●
●
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…