July 7, 2006
Weekend reading: Around the web #15
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Here's a doozy of an around-the-web update. Hopefully you can find something to print out and read over the weekend.
- "Calvino and His Cities," a reminiscence by longtime Italo Calvino translator William Weaver (Link via James Marcus's House of Mirth)
- As a budding book reviewer, I took particular interest in the National Book Critics Circle's ";a href="http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=tips" target="_new">Tips for Book Reviewing," which offers suggestions that seem sound based on my experience as a writer and editor of art reviews
- On Tuesday, the Magazine Reader column at the Washington Post discussed Shock, a new title that has plastered ads (featuring photos of a female boxer being punched in the face and a US soldier holding a bloodied child) all across New York. (Link via Bookslut)
- An essay about Susan Sontag (warning: PDF link) that hangs on a lecture she gave at a small school in southeastern Virginia (Link via PoliticalTheory.info)
- An interview with writer Gary Lutz in the current issue of Bookslut. In April, I mentioned another interview with Lutz, and included excerpts and links to other pieces he has written.
- In The Guardian, a profile of artist Gillian Wearing
- In the Boston Review, John Palattella weighs in with a review-essay about the recent edition of Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected poetry, as well as the controversy that surrounded its publication:
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box does shine a bright light on Bishop’s unpublished work, but it is not a harsh one. It reveals a poet often concerned with dramatizing the unfolding of a sense of stupefaction—of astonishment as well as bewilderment.[ . . . ]
Publishing these works isn’t wrong. But it is weird, since their very persistence seems to defy one of Bishop’s key insights: “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” These lines fall at the end of the first stanza of “One Art,” but the sentiment they express—the relinquishment of the desire for mastery in the face of change and loss—recurs throughout Bishop’s poetry and prose.
- In the Guardian, Tim Adams writes an admiring profile of Bill Buford, former editor of Granta and fiction editor of the New Yorker, on the occasion of the publication of Heat (Knopf). Adams worked for Buford in the '80s, and offers a picture of his boss that I think all of us who work in publishing can appreciate:
Buford believed that the ingredients of a quarterly magazine were a combustible amount of pent-up frustration, many late nights and sudden bursts of adrenaline: he sought to engender this in his writers, his staff and, mostly, himself. The only way of getting any release was to get him to read something or to edit something or to phone someone or to write something, and as each of these demanded telling him what to do, which was invariably a process of cajoling and apology and silence and procrastination, the tension mounted. In the time I worked there, the office was generally tormented by a single question, 'Where is Bill?' and its inevitable supplementary, 'What do you think he is doing?'
- New York Times art critic Roberta Smith offers a tour of Basel's museums that briefly discusses some of the shows you didn't see while there for the art fair
- Further to my post below about museum library websites, you can also glean information from gallery websites. This page on Matthew Marks's site lets viewers know that next year's show at Schaulager (described in Roberta Smith's article) will be a retrospective of gallery artist Robert Gober—a fact not yet publicized by Schaulager.
- Culture Space offers congratulations to Zadie Smith on winning the Orange Prize for Fiction
- ReadySteadyBook notes the publication of A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard, and links to a PDF of the book's introduction
- The publication one year ago of the first volume of John Haffenden's monumnetal biography of literary critic William Empson, Among the Mandarins, caused quite a flurry of review coverage. Now, Stefan Collini reviews, in this week's Times Literary Supplement, Empson's Selected Letters (Oxford University Press)
- Last, but not least, Jed Perl weighs in on curator Mia Fineman's Susan Sontag-tribute exhibition at the Met (a link to my review is listed under "Worth Seeing" in the middle column)
Phew. Have a good weekend.