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