two umbrellas

Happy Bloomsday! Colum McCann has an essay on reading Ulysses.

The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

NYT posts the entire episode of the Dick Cavett Show with John Cheever and John Updike together as guests.

I’ve been quite busy lately with freelance work that I am slacking a bit on original posts/content. So here’s more from around town…

• A “crisis of belief”: The WSJ wonders “Will this crisis produce a ‘Gatsby’?” and discusses literature, the Depression, and Sherwood Anderson:
  

  In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the “American theory of life” — a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. “We Americans have all been taught from childhood,” Anderson wrote, “that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world.” In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called “a crisis of belief.”

  (via ALD.)

• DFW in The New Yorker with more and more (via kottke.) I am now sorely missing The New Yorker.
• Guernica interviews Bernard Henri-Levy (from 2008-Nov), who was recently on a roundtable discussion on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, which is one of the few shows that attempts to discuss issues and not politics.

Once again, the Guardian offers a Summer Fiction Special with new short stories by

• Rose Tremain
• Jeannette Winterson
• Nick Hornby
• Jay McInerney
• Yiyun Li
• AM Homes

I am thankful for the extra day off this weekend since I have been bombarded with good reads:

• A new short story from David Mitchell at the The Guardian (where else?).
• The summer issue of Bookforum arrived at my door yesterday, although I’ve read almost half of it already. But I saved the feature (about film adaptations of literature) for when I’ve calmed down from my initial excitement.
• And (as always) the NYRB – which seems to arrive as soon as I finish the last issue.
• I’m still working through the Best of Young American Novelists part 2
• Only a few pages left of the The Kitchen
• Finally (and I write that loosely), an interview with Charles D’Ambrosio (thanks condalmo)

….at some point I’ll have to force myself to actually get to my writing.

I recently received a copy of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2. And though I haven’t started reading it yet, I am looking forward to diving in. I was a little disappointed that Nell Freudenberger made the cut. I thought Lucky Girls was mediocre at best – but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt with her sophomore effort. Besides, she seems to fit nicely into the the context of the other writers: Americans seem conflicted about where they stand relative to the rest of the world. As Edmund White, who was a judge, noted (taken from the Introduction by Ian Jack) “what might be called the Peace Corps novel, written about the encounter of the young privileged American within the developing world. Often his idealism is sorely tested by cynical insurgents or by poorer but more worldly foreigners.”

Although I will wait to read the selections before I more thoroughly pass judgment, I can’t help but be a little cynical myself – one, of how the books were chosen (by a panel who solicited books from publishers, agents, etc.) and two, of how the selection seems to have a theme, a statement, that I can’t help but think is a bit elitist, academic and not about America or an American sensibility, nor is it about writing – despite how good the writers are or will become. But again, I don’t want to jump to conclusions…

Once again The Guardian delivers another essay on classic literature. This time Mario Vargas Llosa discusses The Old Man and the Sea:

It was written after one of the biggest failures of his literary career, Across the River and into the Trees, a novel full of stereotypes and rhetorical flourishes which seems to be written by a mediocre imitator of The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), and which the critics, above all in the United States, reviewed with ferocity – some of them, as respectable as Edmund Wilson, seeing in that novel the signs of the writer’s irremediable decline. This cruel premonition was close to the mark, because the truth is that Hemingway had entered a period of waning creativity and output, ever more crippled by illness and alcohol, and with little energy for life. The Old Man and the Sea was the swan song of a great writer in decline and, thanks to this proud tale, he became again a great writer by producing what in the course of time – Faulkner saw this – would become, despite its brevity, the most enduring of all his books. Many of the works he wrote, which in their time seemed as if they would have a lasting effect, such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and even the brilliant The Sun Also Rises, have lost their freshness and vigour and now seem dated, out of touch with current sensibilities that reject their elemental macho philosophy and their often superficial picturesque nature. But, like a number of his stories, The Old Man and the Sea has survived the ravages of time without a wrinkle, and preserves intact its artistic seduction and its powerful symbolism as a modern myth.

At The Guardian, Jeanette Winterson discusses Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood:

Peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, Nightwood is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves. Our world, this one now, wants everything on the outside, displayed and confessed, but really it cannot be so. The private dialogue of reading is an old-fashioned confessional, and better for it. What you admit here, what the book admits to you, is between you both and left there. Nightwood is a place where much can be said – and left unsaid.

Zadie Smith writes an essay in the Guardian on what makes good writing and what makes it fail.

But neither did they [what Smith calls critic-practitioners, writers who were critics - specifically, here, she writes of Woolf, Murdoch, and Barthes] think of a writer’s personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don’t think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

The Guardian profiles Philip Gourevitch, the new editor of The Paris Review:

I love what the Paris Review was, its traditions, what it stands for; but I didn’t feel that I was being hired to act as the curator of a museum piece. Rather, that I should treat it as a living thing, with its own new form. It’s a sign of my respect for Plimpton that I’m not trying to be him…

We’re living in complicated and dramatic times, and I feel that our literature, especially the periodical fiction, is rarely up to the wildness and boldness of the times, that it seldom expresses the outlandishness and range of the actors and actions that are shaping our world. Without trying to run a timely publication [the Paris Review is a quarterly] I feel it’s exciting to see what gets thrown off at a glancing angle from the actual headlines: not only as non-fiction narrative, but as fiction, as poetry, even as interview.