Conversational Reading

I think I might have confused some readers, as I’ve started placing links to articles mentioned in my posts at the bottom of the post, instead of embedding them in per regular Internet practices. Reason is, perhaps the most compelling part of The Shallows is the section where Carr presents research on what reading hyperlinked text does to your memory and comprehension. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

There are two absolutely brilliant appreciations, one on the writer Anatole France and another on the composer Leos Janacek, that are alone worth the price of the book. There are also a number of graceful if perfunctory book reviews, an interview about Rabelais, some art-book introductions, a grumpy response to a newspaper’s inquiry on the 100th anniversary of cinema, a birthday tribute to a friend (Carlos Fuentes) and several pieces that are cobbled together from past sketches expanded by subsequent reappraisals. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Bernhard’s ProseShare

I have a review of Prose by Thomas Bernhard at The National.

Hard to believe this is the first English publication of Bernhard’s 1967 collection of short stories, but there you have it. It’s a great read, as are most of Bernhard’s that I’ve read.

Links

My review of Prose by Thomas Bernhard in The National

That’s Art of McSweeney’s. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Speaking of DistractionShare

Guess this distracted reading thing isn’t all that new:

In Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson was already on to the idea that “quick reading” is a side effect of modernity. The mass production of the written word from the mid-nineteenth century onwards has generated a distracted mode of reading that can be aggressively undialectical. Words and images are consumed like candy and then forgotten. Siegfried Kracauer, in his analysis of Weimar cinema, argued that capitalism thrives on this kind of “distraction”: when people are distracted, they tend . . . continue reading, and add your comments

By far the most interesting part of The Shallows is chapter 7, wherein Carr synthesizes a robust body of research that attempts to understand the effects of the Internet on the human mind and, particularly, the working of human memory. It’s some frightening stuff, enough to convince me that I should be offline more and should read more articles in a disconnected environment. (Reasonable alternatives would be a printout, a text document stripped of all rich content, or the Kindle, although each iteration of the Kindle seems to be getting busier and busier, which may be good for sales but is probably bad for concentration.) . . . continue reading, and add your comments

You might expect a heavily footnoted 700-page history of the novel up to 1600 to be anything but readable, gripping, and enjoyable, but The Novel is all of those things — immensely so. After suggesting and rejecting definitions for “novel” (including his own, “the novel is essentially a delivery system for aesthetic bliss”), Moore finally concedes that he’d “rather let authors show me what a novel can be than to impose a definition on them.” He then proceeds to the earliest Egyptian novel prototypes, which bring us “sustained narrative, dialogue, characterization, formal strategies, rhetorical devices, even parody, pornography, metafiction, and magic realism,” and by 1700 BCE in Mesopotamia, we find the “first author for whom we actually have a name: Ipiq-Aya.” . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Orange Eats CreepsShare

Publishing tomorrow: The Orange Eats Creeps, w/intro by Steve Erickson. Here’s a quote from a short review.

Krilanovich is borrowing elements here from pulp horror, but it’s key that an unseen killer is far more sinister than either the gang of vampires or an ominous street that resurfaces throughout the book. Her novel shares a disorienting quality with the final section of Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain, in which time, character, and action collapse in on themselves. That actions are horrific isn’t the only . . . continue reading, and add your comments

But I’m not very interested in reading The Unconsoled as a dream. I’m not precisely sure how to read it (that will have to wait for another day), but viewing it as a dream would probably be among the less interesting readings of this book. At any rate, what I’d like to talk about here is not what is being enacted in these pages but the strange dynamics of the book’s plot. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

I have no idea if this is a workable business model, but David Kipen has opened a bookstore/lending library in Los Angeles: . . . continue reading, and add your comments