Conversational Reading

Possibly not the greatest move in the history of management:

In 1755 Smart signed a 99-year contract with Tom Gardner to write for the Universal Visiter, and the following year (shortly after his largely delightful translation of Horace was finished) he fell down in a crowded street raving in prayer. The following year – after many, many weird incidents that a merciful history would cover in silence – he was locked up in Saint Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he continued to write, was beloved by the staff, but didn’t always recognize the friends and family who at first flocked to see him (strangers could pay a small sum to go and look at him too … Saint Luke’s, like every other madhouse, made most of its operating budget by such revenue). He was also, perhaps pointedly, free from prosecution for debt while he was there.

And that was the remainder of Christopher Smart’s life, which is a pretty melancholy prospect. He continued to write poetry – and some of it is monumentally, almost monstrously strange – but his marriage disintegrated, and finances were as abysmal as always (friends – including the renowned actor David Garrick – often put on benefits for his aid, but the lessons of Raby Castle ran too deep, and Smart never shook them off). In 1770 he was arrested for debt one last time and died in debtor’s prison the following year, with most of his work lost and even the extant stuff – plays, essays, prefaces, and some of the strangest, most luminous religious poetry ever written in English – scattered to the four winds.

If you want to read them, here are the poems.

Dan Green: not a fan of Lorrie Moore’s career trajectory:

Moore’s 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, shows the most precipitous decline into banality and unearned emotion yet. It may be the worst novel by a “name” author I’ve ever read, which is made all the more dismaying by the fact it comes from a writer I once admired. Once again this is a story that leans heavily on the initial emotional appeal of children, but in this case although an orphaned child is introduced and her plight made a center of interest for a while, utlimately this narrative thread has very little emotional weight and is finally dropped, not to be taken up again. Other potentially emotion-laden episodes are introduced as well, but they all remain surprisingly inert, both in narrative and emotional effect. Thus, while the situations evoked in the novel are potentially mawkish, they are executed with so little imagination and formal integrity they essentially just arise and recede without making much of an impression at all. The death of the protagonist’s brother, for example, seems so arbitrary, so clearly the product of narrative convenience that her reaction to it is almost grotesquely overwrought. We’ve been given so little reason to care about the brother, or so little insight into the relationship between sister and brother, this episode as the novel’s climactic event falls disastrously flat even in a narrative that never gets off the ground anyway.

Bad BooksShare

We discussing books we love to hate over at The Constant Conversation. Which, if you’re me, means What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes.

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The Disappearing Digital DataShare

Of course I’m a big fan of digital media for obvious reasons, but I’m also a big fan of print. This would be one of the reasons why:

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those . . . continue reading The Disappearing Digital Data

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Beckett’s PoetryShare

Faber and Faber published a new volume of it last year. Don’t call it minor:

But Beckett didn’t do minor. Or rather, and this was more and more true as his work went on, he was concerned to undo the distinction between major and minor: consider merely the titles of some later works: Texts for . . . continue reading Beckett’s Poetry

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Imperial FictionsShare

Some indication Vollmann’s not done with the area covered in Imperial yet:

RAIL: So you did not stick with the idea of Imperial being a novel for very long?

VOLLMANN: That’s right. Now if I wanted to, I could write a novel set there, and I am as a matter of fact going back there and . . . continue reading Imperial Fictions

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Theresienstadt and the Problem of Knowledge in the Modern WorldShare

Before I get into what I think is a very interesting question, I need to do a little background. Since January I’ve been auditing a course at UC Berkeley called Film 50: History of Cinema. This is a class that meets once a week for a . . . continue reading Theresienstadt and the Problem of Knowledge in the Modern World

Reality Hunger Review @ B&N ReviewShare

Right here.

I liked it, quite a bit. I know a lot of you didn’t, and some of you have very good reasons for not liking it, though I’m not exactly getting the people who say this is a book against literature.

But anyway if you’d like to share your agreement, disagreement, . . . continue reading Reality Hunger Review @ B&N Review

Trash in Contemporary LiteratureShare

I’m looking for recent books that have made trash a major theme The obvious one here is Underworld, and I know there must be more. If you can think of one, let me know in the comments–you’ll be doing me a great service!

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New @ TQC: JC Hallman & AWPShare

We’ve just published the text of the remarks that JC Hallman will be making on his panel at this year’s AWP conference. Why would we publish something like this? I think if you read it, you’ll understand.

Personally, I hope to be there in person to see this thing get . . . continue reading New @ TQC: JC Hallman & AWP