composite drawlings (Free subscription) | 07/02/2009
Go away. When will you be gone from here? Sooner is better than later. In fact, yesterday is better than anything. Why are you still here, again? Oh, of course. You came here for a reading. As if that will help you with your life. But, since that's what you came here for, and that's what will get you to leave, that's what you will have. Here you are : You are a complete prig. Not only are you unyielding...
Of Books and Bicycles (Free subscription) | 07/01/2009
What an odd and wonderful book Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature is. I enjoyed it very much, although I have some caveats to make, and I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you have read the books Nabokov discusses or you plan to read them alongside the lectures. He goes much too in-depth about his chosen [...]
Keeper of the Snails (Free subscription) | 06/28/2009
This very interesting book was sent to me by One World Classics . It is translated from the French by Richard Howard. Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in 1922 and died last year. According to the note at the back of the book he was best known as the pioneering spokesman of the 'Noveau Roman' - a greatly influential movement in post-war French fiction. Vladimir Nabokov says that 'Jealousy' is the finest...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 06/28/2009
As George Weidenfeld's publishing firm celebrates its 60th anniversary, he tells Oliver Marre he is optimistic about what may be in the next chapter "Books about Mary, Queen of Scots sell; books about Latin America don't." This was the advice given to a young Austrian immigrant called George Weidenfeld by Stanley Unwin 60 years ago, when the former was a literary novice and the latter one...
Ensaios Imperfeitos (Free subscription) | 06/21/2009
A still from Bahman Ghobadi's Nobody Knows About Persian Cats , about the underground indie rock scene in Tehran. If you couldn’t get enough of momentous national street protests before, Iran’s ongoing Tweet-volution will certainly keep you buried in a backlog of must-see/read/post-to-Facebook digital tidbits of cyber-democracy in action for a long time. Between refreshing Andrew Sullivan’s...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 06/19/2009
... from high school: When the World Tilted--Again . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) Kerouac's On the Road came out in 1957, so I guess you could say that 1959 was at least two years in the making. Also, Herman Kahn was only part of the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove. Henry Kissinger figured as well. As for Orville Prescott,"the New York Times's stuffy daily book critic," here's a snippet from his...
NewMexiKen (Free subscription) | 06/17/2009
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov Middlemarch by George Eliot The above is the consensus top 10 [...]
John Crowley Little and Big (Free subscription) | 06/16/2009
This quoted by an Irish writer (with a first novel soon due) named Colum McCann, writing in the Times about Ulysses: www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinion/16mccann.html Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity...
Open Culture (Free subscription) | 06/15/2009
The BBC has posted online some 1969 interviews with Vladimir Nabokov. In one piece, Nabokov talks about some of the Russian greats and roundly dismisses Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (my current read) and Crime & Punishment. Ouch. But he saves some kind words for Tolstoy and Joyce. For more, get the interviews here. via Maud Newton’s [...]
Spada Professional Services PR Firm (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
Fifty years ago a letter appeared in the Times about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It was signed by a number of writers, including Al Alvarez, Stephen Spender and Iris Murdoch. They were objecting to the difficulty of obtaining an English edition of Lolita owing to the obscenity laws of the day. The scribes wrote: Prosecutions of genuine [...]
Destination...brick wall (Free subscription) | 06/10/2009
Due to the fact that the disillusioned boring bullshit over the past two weeks has mushed up my brain to the point where it resembles a half set bowl of jelly, I can no longer form a coherent set of words that do not sound like a sales person of the male variety verbally reciting lines from Hamlet from his dick. I really need to put the poor bastard back into the freezer to properly set – i.e....
Al Filreis (Free subscription) | 06/08/2009
I am generally a disciplined reader. I read one book at a time. At most: two. I start and finish, start and finish. The exceptional time of year is now - late May, early June. The end-of-summer deadlines don't press quite yet (after July 4 they do and will). I am reaching for the shelf of books that piled up over the year, with more enthusiasm about reading than I ever otherwise feel. It's why I got...
Power Line (Free subscription) | 06/08/2009
Once upon a time, Playboy was an OK institution--remember the days when it featured contributions by people like Vladimir Nabokov and Alberto Vargas, not to mention Miss October. More recently, though, the magazine has fallen on hard times and is struggling to avoid de-listing and stay out of bankruptcy. Perhaps not coincidentally, its web version has become a left-wing hate site. That's their word,...
The Middle Stage (Free subscription) | 06/05/2009
Some things I've been reading recently ( Warning : to follow me to all these places will require plenty of spare or work time on your part): Amihud Gilead's essay "How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have?" , which persuasively makes the case that Ernest Hemingway's untitled six-word story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." beats all the competition for the most complex and satisfying...
The Washington Times (Free subscription) | 06/05/2009
Bradley Cooper is not just a pretty face. The 34-year-old actor can talk intelligently about how Hollywood is faring in the new economy. He can wax rhapsodic about films from Iran and Finland he saw as a juror for this year's Tribeca Film Festival. He not only can list the usual suspects with whom he'd like to work (everyone says Martin Scorsese) but launch into his love for 73-year-old British actress...
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