Dear Reader,
In honor of Markus Dohle’s resignation as CEO of Penguin Random House, here are a few photos I took a month ago while I was watching Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. (Aha, you can see our Film Forum mailer sitting on the sound bar… I could go back and take actual screenshots of this scene but… it feels like a pathetic bit of Whit Stillman-esque inadvertent character revelation so I’ll leave it…)
It should go without saying that The Last Days of Disco is the greatest publishing conglomeration movie I’ve seen since Mike Nichols’ Wolf.
Know of any other publishing conglomeration movies? I beg of you, drop them in the comments.
—Dana
1. “The Weak Novel” by Lucy Ives, The Baffler
Lucy Ives writes about “the weak novel.” (“A novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all.”)
…You could call his efforts performance art: he’d go down to the city and drum up sales by giving unhinged readings. His novel was published serially, and as he composed, he threw in catty references to reviews of previous installments. He had written a book about nothing, yet it was full of characters and events. Nothing much took place—the reader learned only about the first moments of somebody’s life over the course of many hundreds of pages—but there is perhaps no work of English prose more thundering with human activity, desires, and hairbrained schemes than Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
Over a century later, it was termed “the most typical novel” of all world literature by Viktor Shklovsky, seminal Russian theorist… Either Tristram Shandy was a masterpiece against which all novels might be measured, or it was a weak attempt by an overly ambitious pretender with a clever idea but no control and even less taste, a torrent of “lexical diarrhea”—to repurpose Dave Eggers’s summation of Infinite Jest’s failings in a 1996 review published in the San Francisco Chronicle…
2. “I Also Split in Two” by Noah Warren, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Noah Warren reviews Sara Deniz Akant’s Hyperphantasia (Rescue) and Jessica Laser’s Planet Drill (Futurepoem).
“In the end, I played the villain. I took the bus back home. / I dry-rubbed off my dead skin in a sweaty plastic room.”
3. “Houses of Holes” by Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
Nathaniel Rich reviews novels by Hiroko Oyamada, of which the most recently translated, by David Boyd, is Weasels in the Attic (New Directions).
Oyamada, who was born in 1983, has said that her first novel, The Factory, was inspired by… a momentary hallucination. She was working as a temp at a large car factory near Hiroshima, where she was born and still lives. One day, when she glanced up from her desk she saw, by the printing station, a woman holding a giant black bird. Oyamada replays the scene on the final page of the book: “She had a tight grip on its wings, but it wasn’t trying to fly away. It was definitely alive, surveying its surroundings.” In the novel, the woman, holding the bird in front of her, walks out of the office without comment. In reality, Oyamada realized that the woman was not holding a bird at all but some printer component—a toner cartridge, perhaps. Oyamada quit and wrote The Factory, choosing to spend her days in the hallucinated reality rather than the actual one.
4. “Constance Debré’s Deviant, Defiant Performance of Motherhood” by Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker
Alexis Okeowo reviews Constance Debre’s Love Me Tender (Semiotext(e)), translated by Holly James.
She’s in limbo, she tells us. “Waiting for the book to come out, waiting for the court case to start moving, waiting for a bit of cash to come through, waiting to see my son again. Waiting for things to calm down, for the universe to adjust.” But she refuses to give in: “I won’t go back, I won’t climb back into my old skin.”
5. “Misreading Ulysses” by Sally Rooney, The Paris Review
Sally Rooney on Ulysses and the state of the novel post-Ulysses.
In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.
6. “A Century of Serious Difficulty” by Johanna Winant, Boston Review
Johanna Winant writes about the books of 1922.
This year marks the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis. For many, that means T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—both first published in book form in 1922—perhaps along with the first English language translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These books are in different genres and disciplines—poetry, fiction, philosophy—but all of them wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects…
…The myth of 1922 was made and spread by the writers themselves, along with their friends and enemies, their heirs and their fans. Eliot, reviewing Joyce, wrote, “In using the myth in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.” Ezra Pound wrote “The Christian Era ended at midnight on Oct. 29-30”—when Joyce finished writing Ulysses—and thereafter we are in “year 1 p.s.U.” that is, post-scriptum Ulysses. William Carlos Williams, not a fan, wrote that The Waste Land “wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.” Willa Cather famously grieved, “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts”—the following year she won the Pulitzer Prize, and already she was considered a writer of the past.
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