Weekend Content

Peter Doig

• It’s Friday, so let’s be frivolous. National Book Award speculation.
• Speaking of frivolous, Nobel odds. Right now there are three American authors in the top 6.
• 10 books that turned me on to poetry
• While they’re at it, they can buy my blog archives:
  • Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry
    buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent
    poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the
    biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is
    a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary
    institutions and markets.
• The CUP Blog

  • Q: How do film, television, star culture, and consumer society synergize to create this being?

    DH: Beware any simple answer! What is unique from the point of view
    of aesthetics is this. The aesthetics of film and of television are
    largely antagonistic. Except in the case of the star icon where they
    alchemize. Let me explain. Film luxuriates in distance between audience
    and character, creating desire and identification while separating
    viewer from star as the moon is separated from earth. Television is by
    contrast about up close and personal. It allows characters to live
    parallel lives to our own, which means we expect to know everything
    about them, like our friends and neighbors. This works against the
    distance demanded by aura. There is little place in television for star
    quality, which is why television is the perfect instrument for
    celebrity construction. You can take any nobody and make them a
    somebody by having them recite the weather on nightly news, which was
    the subject of Woody Allen’s desultory film Celebrity. Television’s best characters (Tony and Carmela, Don Draper from Mad Men, Archie and Ethel Bunker from All in the Family)
    are always felt to be of this earth, people like us but “more,” perhaps
    more peculiar and repetitive, but people we could run into in a
    supermarket (we might not want to). The thought of running into Lisa
    (Grace Kelly) in Rear Window is so far from our imaginations
    that, to bring home how safe we feel far away from her (even if we want
    also to possess her), Hitchcock has her come off screen toward us the
    first time she kisses Jeff (Jimmy Stewart), and it is uncanny and
    terrifying.

• Pynchon is publishing another novel?
• Three Percent reviews the recent translation of Danilo Kis’s first novel (a.k.a. the translation that the Literary Saloon pretty much declared the worst-marketed translation ever)
  • Serbian Classics has published a long-awaited English translation of Danilo Kis’s first novel, Mansarda. Kis, one of the most critically praised writers from the former Yugoslavia, made his reputation with the novels Garden, Ashes and Hourglass. A collection of short stories centered around the Stalinist purges of the ‘30s, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,
    caused him a great deal of trouble from the Yugoslav government, which
    was very vigilant about the slightest criticism of the Titoist regime.
    This is an irony that Kis probably appreciated since Stalin and Tito
    were great political enemies. Mansarda, however, is a different kind of novel which is more introspective and less political than his later works.
• The New Republic on Maxim Biller
• An excerpt from John Banville’s novel-in-progress

George Inness

• The Paris Review talking with Marilynne Robinson
• Jonathan Raban on Sarah Palin
• This is a pretty good lineup:

  At the moment, what are you working on?

  I just finished going over the copy-edited proofs of The Kindly Ones, my translation of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. My translation of Pierre Bayard’s L’affaire du chien des Baskerville, called Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong:  Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA next month.
  Some other recent projects include a beautiful meditation
  on sleep, The Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham),
  as well as two books by the Tunisian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb, Tombeau of Ibn Arabi and White Traverses (both from Fordham).  My translation of Proust’s Pastiches (which to my knowledge have never been translated into English before), The Lemoine Affair, has just been published by Melville House. And I recently translated a wonderful excerpt from the new novel Zone by Mathias Enard—I hope that finds a publisher in America or the UK, since there’s nothing like it out there. I would love to be able to translate the whole book.

Johnson&Johnson

John Berryman

1 – 100 by Charles Bernstein

Madvillian

Watch the documentary The Corporation for free via BitTorrent.