This Week in Books: “Pynchon (pronounced pin-CHON)” ???
“Vigilant men reported the poets to the police.”
Dear Reader,
Bookforum is being shuttered by its brand new overlords. They were the cream of the crop, the best of the best. You see a lot of quotes going around right now saying they were a launching pad for writers into the wider world of book reviewing and maybe that’s so from a writer’s perspective, but from a reader’s perspective it seemed like they were somehow the most selective? Or not selective so much as they held the art of criticism to a very high aesthetic standard. It was all stylish prose from powerful writers in their prime. Or so it seemed to me. What a senseless loss.
I updated my list of cool books of 2022, so now there are 50 cool books. A little help in the cool department for all you last minute holiday shoppers. Because yep, that’s me, that’s my specialty: cool. Everyone who meets me, everyone who sees what has become of me, they think, “Yeah, that’s cool.”
Uhh and, is that it? That might be it. (*a voice from the gallery*: Well I always interpreted “cool” to be obviously intended as a pun on the cold weather of the winter holid— *the speaker is cut off when struck by a cabbage, tossed elegantly from the orchestra seats*) I’m taking a holiday break from this newsletter for the next two weeks. I’ll be back in the new year.
Oh and also this is the first time the New York Times has reported this, I feel like we need clarification.
Happy Holidays, & Happy New Year!
—Dana
1. “Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books” by Kate Dwyer and Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times
Bookforum and its sister publication, Artforum, were acquired by Penske Media Corporation last week…
…Bookforum encouraged editors to experiment and take chances, said Namara Smith, a former editor at the magazine who now works at The New Yorker.
Every time they closed an issue, she and a colleague would say to each other that they couldn’t believe they were still being allowed to put out the magazine, she said. “It always felt like we were getting away with something.”
2. “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s Voices in the Dark” by Isaac Butler, The New Yorker
Isaac Butler revisits Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.
…Kiss of the Spider Woman is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former.
…Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre… [H]e fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others…
…[A]fter his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes…
3. “A Dream of a Great Burning” by Tobi Haslett, The New York Review of Books
Tobi Haslett writes about books by John Edgar Wideman, the most recent of which is the story collection Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone (Scribner).
“You keep writing those buggy books,” says Robby to his brother Thomas in the novel Fanon (2008). “Always fussing cause you say nobody reads them, but you keep writing them. I dig it.” Robby reads them in prison, by the light in his cell.
…Prison now stands at the heart of Wideman’s writing. Some of his most bursting, extravagant plots drag us back to the bleakness of penitentiary visiting hours—the soaring walls, the clanging gates, the ludicrous rules, the wounded speech. Prison is the metal mouth that devours the men he loves. Love mixes with his guilt and drives him, painfully, to write. Tommy, the protagonist of Hiding Place as well as the eponymous story, is a young fugitive based openly on [Wideman’s brother] Robby, to whom Damballah is dedicated: “These stories are letters. Long overdue letters from me to you. I wish they could tear down the walls. I wish they could snatch you away from where you are.”
…If he were a less difficult stylist, Wideman would quite simply be the writer of mass incarceration…
4. “A Communion of Pathless Solitudes” by Joshua Hren, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Joshua Hren reviews Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels (FSG).
Adam Nicolson’s book… chronicles the tumultuous year (1797–98) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent as neighbors and collaborators, friends and rivals on the Somerset Quantocks. During this time, they composed aloud, wandering lonely as clouds as they broke through copsewood branches and enjambments, pacing down and then up a narrow gravel walk…
An observant farmer found the ritual rural jaunts of these two flâneurs a “queer thing.” He was troubled by the fact that Wordsworth’s “brain was that fu’ of sic stuff, that he was forced to be always at it whether or no, wet or fair, mumbling to hissel’ along t’roads.” …[A]lthough “nobody ever heard [them] say one word about politics,” vigilant men reported the poets to the police… Soon enough, the two poets came under official surveillance: England’s Home Department hired a faux caretaker to tend the Romantics’ riotous garden.
5. “Thomas Pynchon, Famously Private, Sells His Archive” by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
Pynchon (pronounced pin-CHON) (???? -T.E.O.T.W.R.), who was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., in 1937, has never been the subject of a full-fledged biography…
Those seeking information about his life have mostly been limited to the introduction to Slow Learner, a 1984 collection revisiting short stories he wrote between 1959 and 1964, and a handful of published reminiscences from old friends and ex-friends (like Jules Siegel, author of a 1977 Playboy article titled “Who Is Thomas Pynchon … and Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?”).
6. “Normal, Regular, and Rich” by Katherine Packert Burke, Full Stop
Katherine Packert Burke reviews Charlie Markbreiter’s Gossip Girl Fan Novella (Kenning Editions).
…Gossip Girl Fan Novella consists of three main threads: 1) fanfic of the original show, 2) the story of a trans man named Gordon working on Gossip Girl 3 in the near future, and 3) essayistic blocks covering fandom, trans politics, and celebrity culture in the twenty-first century…
…The intersection of capital-N Normalcy and money suffuses the book. In the near-future sections, Gordon, who worked on the original Gossip Girl, is successfully shamed into taking a gig writing for the reboot by his friend, Marcus, who always picks up the check when they get lunch together… He acquiesces, helping to develop a Gossip Girl reboot for our apocalyptic times: Nate, Dan, and the gang are fighting for resources while the Gossip Girl blog provides tips for where to find clean water…
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