Fiction, essays, reviews. Memoir ARCHEOLOGY OF A GOOD RAGÙ, 2021. Fiction praised by Salman Rushdie, Washington Post: “a new shriek for a new century."
With others, I salute
#HelenVendler
, her rare mind for poetry, esp.
#JohnAshbery
, & her good heart. I have story or two, but nothing to match this, from
#RitaDove
:
@sarahroseetter
Ghostwrote a couple books-- or I was one of the ghostwriters. The $$$ was, wow-- biggest I've ever seen. My thought was: make real money & save the marriage. I made the money, but my wife still left me (also I hated myself & got v fat). Quit on Book
#3
, happily.
Our birthday boy,
#AllenGinsberg
, as he looked on the night when, following a Boston reading that knocked me out, he kissed me on the mouth. (Till then, my date had been indifferent at best, but oh boy, was her tune change.) Burn on, angelheaded hipster.
"What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?... It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible & allowable.” Audre Lorde, blistering & brilliant, by
@rgay
,
@parisreview
How heartening to see all the memorials for
#JohnBarth
, testimony to the extent of his impact. So, okay. Here's my piece from a few years back,
@lithub
, celebrating him & his overlooked later work. Thanks always,
@JonnyDiamond
:
“We know from Ovid that none of us is only one thing… & Jack Barth was many… a towering figure… ; to listen to him speak was like listening to Bach; generosity & warmth & wit.”
@JennyBoylan
on the magisterial writer,
#JohnBarth
, a great presence in my life, dead this evening.
@KashJackson2018
This tweet is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. It completely misrepresents the CNBC report, and more than that proves "Kash" here doesn't trust good news work because he can't read it.
@harukimurakami_
FWIW, while I had an early book at 30, I went 18 years before the next— & only after that hit my stride. I’d say I was at my most creative in my mid-to late 60s, w/ three books in 5 years. Plus now I’m into something really weird.
"Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, w/ its architecture & its playing cards, w/ the dread of its mythologies & the murmur of its languages,... w/ its algebra & its fire...." Where begin
#Borges23
, if not w/ "Tlon, Uqbar?"
@DMRegister
Despicable -- an injury to the rights of women everywhere -- and an action soon to wind up in court, where the legal battle will drain Iowa monies for years and years.
Awards are rarely so richly deserved: last night, at the kickoff to
#AWP23
, lovely
@dzancbooks
, run by sharp, smart editor
@m_dotter
, took the prize as Best Small Publisher.
"it is this defamiliarizing way of seeing the world from the margins that runs like a bright red, revolutionary thread throughout her virtuosic literary oeuvre."
@lithub
, the late, great
#DubravkaUgre
šić, honored by Ellen Elias-Bursac & other translators.
"At home, I haven’t got a single book of mine, nor a single book written about me. I hardly know what I have written." Since yesterday's
#Borges23
got so much love, I dug up this recent, refound interview w/ Mark Childress &
@McNairWrites
,
@lareviewofbooks
Can't resist more
#ItaloCalvino
. In Rome there's an exhibit up, currently, reproducing his library & workspace. The blue butterfly was his own handiwork.
"The fact is the truth is a lot more interesting than anything I could make up & that's why I'm telling it in the first place." -- Russell Banks, RULE OF THE BONE. A ferocious imagination; rest in power.
Sometimes, an election feels like an affirmation-- like when
@TobiasCarroll
gets voted onto the Board of
@bookcritics
. Glad to be a part of the effort, & to see such a happy outcome.
“She writes about what are considered traditionally very female subjects... & a lot of prolific female writers who center on female experience tend to not be canonized.”
@OlgaRavn
on the power & inspiration of
#DorisLessing
, w/
@nickhilden
@The_Millions
.
“He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost & that the world’s pain & its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity & that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
--Cormac McCarthy
My Thanksgiving has to include a toast to
@BorisDralyuk
, now leaving the editor's chair at
@LAReviewofBooks
. Under his tenure, LARB remained no less than splendid, & one of the very best platforms for voices out of Ukraine. /Bravo, e alla prossima!/
You may have things to do & people to see at
#AWP23
, all writerly & in demand-- but you'll never be as cool as
#JamesBaldwin
up on a ledge in Istanbul, c. 1975.
@chamomeriam
#JohnBerryman
was once asked by a student, “When do you know your work’s any good?” The student was a gifted youngster named Merwin— W.S. Merwin. Berryman’s reply: “You never know. You die without knowing.”
"Proof that the language of Shevchenko is not just flourishing but evolving...; the process is life-giving, for both Ukrainian speakers & the language itself."
@LAReviewofBooks
continues its deep dive into the literature of Ukraine, w/
@LillianPosner
:
"Writing feels futile.... And to ruminate on syntax during a genocide feels pretentious & self-aggrandizing. There are Palestinian children dying of sleep deprivation & I’m telling you about my inability to use commas."
@nickikattoura
@lithub
, scorching.
How about I mix in a curveball? Ten favorite novellas, no two by the same author:
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Snow White
Cherì
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Anjou Flying Streamers After
Wittgenstein's Nephew
The Dead
The Metamorphosis
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Turn of the Screw
"What an artist does, is fail." That's
#DonaldBarthelme
, his story "The Sandman," 1972, & it's a fine, grim affirmation to hear it again,
@StephenMarche
, in a resonant piece
@nytimesbooks
(which I put off reading a couple months, gathering my strength).
"When it comes to writing about war don’t make the same mistake I made, which is thinking your head is a... grill, designed to cook your brain into a greaseless, edible paddy. Because not even zombies eat their own brains." RIP,
@gabehudson
. In peace.
Serious wow. Out of nowhere, an astonishing inheritance from (I think) a long-gone great aunt. The Blake/Yeats is a Modern Library 1st run, 1922, w/ an extensive intro & meticulous notes by WBY himself.
"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight." -- WAYS OF SEEING,
#JohnBerger
, born OTD.
@AdamsOrArdor
I always thought James Joyce did a good job, under terrible circumstances. His daughter Julia is a talented, tragic case, & he quit FINNEGAN for months at a time & got her the best treatment he could (though Carl Jung proved a monster). FWIW, I’ve written about my fathering.
Dubravka Ugresic, another refugee master, a prose trickster who magicked fiction & essay into fresh illuminations, witty & blood-soaked at once-- gone today, at 73. Flights of angels...
In chronological order, L to R— as wide-ranging, far-seeing, & altogether masterly a trio of novels as anyone has brought off anywhere, lately.
#KhaledKhalifa
, translated Leri Price.
@TheLuisPanini
His sister Ottla proved rather heroic. The last record we have of her, she volunteered to accompany a trainload of children bound for Auschwitz.
@mfol_mi
Good for you. What these men did is horrifying and contrary to the whole idea of civil government. These big babies should be locked up; if they were black, they would be already.
Now for the merely personal. Over in Italy,
@ArkadiaEditore
has a fiitingly intense cover for the translation of my TALKING HEADS: 77 (pub. 2003, so "historical"). Release date is August 9, & at the end of that month & early the next, I'll have a few events. /Grazie infinite./
Late getting to today's email, I've only now seen the sad news about
@_conjunctions
. Bard College can no longer provide funding, & the issue after next will be the last. Here's a salute to editor Brad Morrow for all his discernment & winning work over the years.
A podcast of rare urgency & enchantment,
@emergence_zine
via
@lithub
. The subject "dedicated his life to studying and preserving Ethiopia’s last primary forests." His work concerns "trees & hermits, but...also the story of a man & his love for both."
It’s sweet news when a writer so gifted & conscientious, at once endlessly playful & dead serious, earns a half-million advance.
#PercivalEverett
revisits
#HuckleberryFinn
.
@lithub
Throwback? How about
#JohnBarth
, live & kicking in 1966? Then 36, he already had
#SotWeedFactor
& Giles G-B behind him, & he'd begun the "Funhouse" stories. He samples widely, performatively, & takes Q's, for an hour plus at U IL Champagne. Amazing, & only privately available .
I mean, this could be peak
#BookTwitter
: I’ve spent the better part of an hour searching out those volumes w/ title & author written horizontally, rather than vertically, & then I arranged a small sample:
An unavoidable Throwback. In Italy, April 25 celebrates the Resistance, their 1945 victory over Hitler & Mussolini. Also, a couple of days earlier was the birthday of my father Enzo. Here he is in ‘45, in Naples, a liaison for the Allied OSS following his teenage partisan days.
What on earth possesses me? I try out the books for 30 pages or so, & next thing you know I'm pestering editors to let me review debut collections on small, small presses, by complete unknowns, with zippo for publicity.
@dbessner
Must demur. As I’ve written elsewhere, we seem to me to live in a Golden Age of criticism— so many venues, so lively a discourse. I’d say
@mervatim
has it right; you’re concerned about the absence of critical stature like this guy enjoyed:
@lyzl
I recall breaking into inconsolable tears— a major weeping jag— right in the mediator’s office. Very late in the process, I realized finally I couldn’t save things.
"Writers need to interrogate why they are writing about a specific issue or community, &... do so with integrity."
@AnjaliEnjeti
@LAReviewofBooks
, taking w/
@kavitamix
& grappling w/timeless questions of artist's social conscience.
This went around the webs yesterday, but as someone who's been following
@bwhobson
since his small-press debut, it's high time I put it up myself. A new creative high-water mark for the man, great to see.
"Only if poets & writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares to imagine will literature continue to serve a purpose." --
#ItaloCalvino
, born Oct. 15.
“Robert Louis Stevenson was leaner & meaner than Stoker, more psychologically adroit than Shelley, and an altogether more suspenseful storyteller.”
@joe_hill
@The_Millions
, characteristically sharp on what makes great horror.
"[His last words] depict the consummation of a life consecrated to literature.... The writings emerged from an intense contact with a vast array of books." Patricio Ferrari,
@parisreview
, reconfiguring how we read
#Pessoa
.
Among those we lost in ‘22 was
#BruceDuffy
, & my gifts today included tine w/ THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT, his novel of Wittgenstein. WWI finds the philosopher in the trenches, his sleep disturbed by his platoon nemesis, or his monstrous revenant, offering a critique of TRACTATUS:
Throwback, 2017: yesterday I posted the new
#JennyErpenbeck
(due in June), & it was great to see so many others shared my enthusiasm. So here we are, on a balcony in Berlin, following my interview w/her.
"I don’t think that Flaubert could have approved of me if he gave me such a long drawn out, unattractive death." A smart & playful imagination, quite marvelous in a story from Pauline Melville,
@electriclit
, intro by
@blgtylr
,