THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW - Pynchon on Marquez By Thomas Pynchon; Thomas Pynchon, author of ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' has been working on another novel.Published: April 10, 1988 LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95. LOVE, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? In the postromantic ebb of the 70's and 80's, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. And - oh boy - does he write well. HERE'S what happens.
The double pressure: a review of David Shields' Reality Hunger Reading David Shields’ new book – but in what way is it a book? – is a frustrating experience. As demonstrated by the previous sentence, on almost every page of Reality Hunger the reader is interrupted by responses, doubts and questions. "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time" it begins, "is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Why, one asks, half-aware of the question because one is trying to get into the book, does he use "artistic movement" rather than "artist"? Reality Hunger's immediate resort to journalistic cliché establishes a workman-like, commonsense approach to its subject. Cave art would be a good starting point. Starting again As this review has not got beyond the opening sentences of the book without crippling, unanswered questions, it will struggle to move any further unless it starts again. This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text.
The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Joyce Carol Oates Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Penguin, 527 pp., $36.00 Charles Dickens: A Life (Waterstone’s Special Edition) by Claire Tomalin, with an appendix of selected letters by Dickens London: Viking, 542 pp., £30.00 The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself. Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? London. Fog everywhere. And equally characteristic of Dickens, a chapter opening in the lesser-regarded and uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which a natural observation acquires a portentous metaphoric significance: Irresistibly the reader is drawn into the voice—exquisitely lyric, yet with a profound melancholy beneath—of the child Philip Pirrip—“Pip”—of Great Expectations: Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. The narrative is present-tense; the mood is suspenseful. This is a very small episode in the life of Dickens, but it allows us to see him in action….
on Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields (Knopf) | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD) David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto ardently tags after the American poets who have dismissed the facts of the day and their shotgun-riding media and arts. “Realism is a corruption of reality,” said Wallace Stevens. In 1951, as the hydrogen bomb made its debut, William Carlos Williams voiced his disregard: “What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred, given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. Shields channels Philip Roth to make the same complaint about “American reality. Arguing for custody of the images and sounds of reality, Shields says the realists are infidels, and the clanking machinery of their novels no longer satisfies: “Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we year for the ‘real,’ semblances of the real. Of relevant interest --
When Respected Authors, from Goethe to Kerouac, Try Their Hand at Painting Freshly posted on publisher Melville House‘s blog, you’ll find examples of visual art by textual artists; drawings and paintings, in other words, drawn and painted by people who have gone down in history for their way with sentences. This could easily turn into a lesson about not quitting one’s day job. But, as you can see from the work above, Maria Nys Huxley at Siesta, Melville House blogger Kevin Murphy hasn’t put together a study in the incompetence of the dilettante. You’ve surely already guessed the literary connection: the painting came from the hand of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, who put his wife Maria Nys to canvas in 1920, when both were still in their twenties. The post features more paintings from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Hermann Hesse, e.e. cummings, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, and Henry Miller. Can you guess the author — er, artist? via @KirstinButler
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields David Griffith nonfiction Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields In the opener of David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto -- a collage of unattributed quotes by luminous thinkers and writers about our obsession with “the real” in art, literature and culture -- Shields asks us to read his book without peeking at the endnotes where the origin of each quote is revealed. As other reviewers have already noted, it’s difficult to resist. “Who said that?” Indeed, only twenty pages in, the margins of the book overflowed with penciled notes (stars, check marks, question marks and exclamation points), but the geeky game of guessing who said what began to wear thin, and I started to pine for those Aristotelian unities. So, hacked off, and thinking of the review I was charged to write, I searched for more reasons not to like this coy book. Reality Hunger doesn’t feel that way. And as far as manifestos go, it’s not really that audacious or irrational.
Nietzsche Is Dead Count Harry Kessler received the news in the officers’ mess of his army regiment from a fellow officer going through dispatches. On October 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche, who had famously announced the death of God, had himself died. During the previous decade, Nietzsche’s writings had taken German culture by storm. One of Kessler’s friends joked that “six educated Germans cannot come together for a half hour without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned.” The philosopher’s tragic decline only added to his mystique. As Nietzsche’s ideas were being adapted to various and contrary ends by avant-garde artists, psychoanalysts, and racial ideologues, his death provoked a battle over his legacy. The count was a man of voracious intellect and endless charm, as well as a deeply committed diarist. In the years leading up to the First World War, Kessler channeled his organizational talents into designing and raising money for a memorial to honor Nietzsche. He lay sleeping on a sofa.
Reality Hunger, by David Shields « John’s Blog I picked this book up because it’s mentioned in an online correspondence between Jonathan Lethem (one of my very favorite authors, although I’m finding Chronic Town tough to get through and David Gates. They both clearly admire the work as a way of helping them think about their own writing, and the way that writing is changing. It’s a funny sort of book — really a collection of about 800 numbered passages, some of which are only 3 or 4 words, some which stretch to 3 or 4 pages. Some of them are Shield’s own writing, lots of them are cribbed from other authors. His main point is that the novel is dead. “When Frey, LeRoy, Defonseca, Seltzer, Rosenblat, Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He doesn’t really argue that novels will actually disappear — more that they are occupying a less and less central place in our culture. One of my favorite set of passages:
George Orwell - The Orwell Prize Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard Voices in Time I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. This is the B-E axis. Now let me give you a marketing tip. Another is called “Boy Meets Girl,” but this needn’t be about a boy meeting a girl [begins drawing line B]. Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. One of the most popular stories ever told starts down here [begins line C below B-E axis]. There’s to be a party at the palace. And when she shows up she’s the belle of the ball [draws line upward]. Now there’s a Franz Kafka story [begins line D toward bottom of G-I axis]. It’s a pessimistic story. His father has just died. Well, was this good news or bad news?