“Nerval is remembered as a minor literary figure, an eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a ribbon in the Palais Royal, gabbled his poetry in doorways, read at night with a candlestick on his head, and slept in coaches with his head in a noose, habits that endeared him to aesthetes and literary anecdotalists.”
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“Someone said there are only two ways to live your life: one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is. I’ve always been convinced Havana is an annexed colony of the latter…
“I was sitting in the rafters next to a father and son for the morning set of fights going on during the Cuban National Boxing Championships held at Kid Chocolate gymnasium in Old Havana. My high school gym might’ve cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t recreate what this place looks like.
“The murals and chipped paint and scoreboards and rafters and ceiling takes your breath away — yet it’s the faces in the crowd that steal the show. The tickets don’t cost anything for Cubans. Everyone can come. There’s no advertising anywhere. Even though there are Olympic champions in the ring periodically who could cash in to the tune of millions, most don’t. Nobody here is making a dime off world class ability.”
Brin Friesen writes about Cuba, and boxing in Cuba, in an excerpt from his ongoing memoir/novel The Domino Diaries, over at the Nervous Breakdown.
New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson — who is, in my opinion, a top contender for a spot on IHateYouAndIWantYourLife.com — has written a fascinating piece outlining his view of the way ambitious novels have changed in the past ten years.
Those doorstops from the late 90s — Infinite Jest being Anderson’s main example — have given way to smaller novels “obsessed with creating and capturing voices,” books like Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Anderson’s main counterexample to Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao. Why is that? (more…)
Today, issue number 18 of the Quarterly Conversation was published, including my review of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s cult classic, Nog. Excerpt:
Although Nog has never been entirely forgotten since its first publication in 1968, it has never fully emerged from cult-classic status; as Erik Davis observes in the introduction to the recent Two Dollar Radio edition, it has been “attracting passionate fans over forty years of slipping in and out of print.” It’s easy to see how it managed to stay alive during those decades despite critical neglect: it’s a successful and haunting piece of experimental fiction, and a reader who has enjoyed it will press it upon others.
Its neglect is a little trickier to explain; perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that many contemporary reviewers pegged the novel as being a record of a drug trip (based upon no evidence other than sales copy) and that the most superficial reading of the book would likely focus on the vaguely hippie-like characters and their pastimes of popping pills and having casual sex. And many of the contemporary blurbs on the book, including the much-reproduced remarks of Thomas Pynchon, amount to little more than “wow, what a trip, man.” It’s easy to dismiss a book if it’s merely a document of the times.
“His prose may often rest on a banality (“we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that we’re not superior”) but his inner turmoil over such bland ideas, expressed with a post-adolescent intensity, is disarming.”
Ron Slate reviews the new book from actor, playwright and filmmaker Wallace Shawn, Essays. (Several months ago, we wrote about one of these essays, “Writing About Sex”.)
Thoreau’s Journal is forthcoming in a new edition from NYRB Classics, abridged by Damion Searls; the Quarterly Conversation’s Geoff Wisner has given a favorable and interesting review of the book: (more…)
“Fitzgerald, to put it mildly, did not impress the studio bosses. The rap against him was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious — at times, even grim. Billy Wilder, who seemed genuinely fond of Fitzgerald, likened him to ‘a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job’ — with no idea how to connect the pipes and make the water flow.”
The November 16 New Yorker features an article by Arthur Krystal (abstract) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years trying to make a go of it in Hollywood, from 1937 until his death in late 1940. It’s a fascinating overview, not only of those years in his life, but of Fitzgerald’s entire career and how Hollywood worked at the time. Fitzgerald never had much luck with anything after 1930, and as Krystal writes, “on the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, evocative. [...] So what was the problem?” (more…)
“Thin as legend claims, the models streamed into view. [...] There was a bit of everything going on. The models appeared, variously, as flappers, can-can dancers, sprites, zombies — you name it. A seasoned fashion writer said to me later that this show had actually been comparatively tame: ‘There were things in it that you might even wear,’ he said. Nothing brought home to me my ignorance of couture more clearly than this crestfallen lament.
“To my untutored eye what was on offer here had nothing to do with clothing as traditionally understood. Looking at the coats — which seemed capable of almost anything except keeping you warm or dry — I was reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s response to clients who grumbled about the roof leaking: that’s how you can tell it’s a roof. And so it was here: it was primarily by their extravagant refusal of the function for which they had been nominally intended that they could be defined as clothes.”
The incomparable Geoff Dyer, reviewing Paris fashion shows in Issue 8 of Five Dials. Beginning there, he ends up discovering the “primal” and timeless qualities of an art I also know nothing about. (more…)
France has a law in place, established in 1981, that requires all booksellers in the country — big-box stores, independent stores, online retailers — to sell a given book at the same price as all their competitors. (Stores can do some discounting in order to help move stock, but the maximum discount allowed is 5%.) Chad Post at Three Percent writes of the effect this law has had on book culture in France, and it’s a lesson we’d do well to emulate (as if): there are no price wars, publishers can set prices based primarily on internal costs, and it has encouraged diversity in publishing. (more…)
Here’s some weekend reading: Sigrid Nunez has written a beautiful memoir of Susan Sontag in the latest issue of Tin House. (The text is not available online, but I highly recommend you pick up this issue of Tin House: it’s a really good one.) Nunez was involved with Sontag’s son David, and all three lived together for many years, and much of the memoir is about that time, but Nunez and Sontag remained friends for years after their household split up. I’ve quoted it at length after the jump.
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