In the new Bookforum some reviews for your consideration: Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature, Ed Park’s Personal Days and Japanamerica author Roland Kelts takes in Donald Keene’s Chronicles of My Life * Ed Park meets Bat Segundo * ‘Giddy & Malevolent’, the New York Review of Books on Patrick Hamilton: “Hamilton is often seen as the darkly comic bard of alcoholism, but drunkenness was only a subset of what engaged his interest. He was fascinated by consciousness in all its forms, ordinary and altered, pathological and normal. The last writer one might think to compare him to is Virginia Woolf, but in fact the proportion of exterior to interior action in his work is at times reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway, and there’s a similar recognition of how little it requires to send someone hurtling down a rather rocky path of memory and reflection.” [via Booktwo] * Scott Pack’s The Best of the Rest of the Booker, a “hastily thrown together but undisputably bookish panel [including Dan Rhodes] have decided on a shortlist of 10 novels that should have won the Booker but didn’t – and it’s now up to the public to vote for their favourite. The prize? “I will bake a cake for the winner,” writes Pack. * Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto goes for a song * Born Magazine, “art and literature, together” * John Berger’s Ways of Seeing [YouTube & via ReadySteadyBook] * Ten of the best smokes in literature * At the Hay Festival, Hanif Kureishi slams creative writing courses:“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student. The writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice.”* The Indpendent ask, What’s behind the rise in literary festivals, and what’s their purpose? * The new Beats? Hardly, though it’s nice to see Leontia Flynn get a mention * Stuart Kelly on Scottish Literature: Let’s rephrase the questions that lie behind that golden-age rhetoric. Is Scotland producing more, or better, literature than England - or Iceland, or China? How would we even go about judging the number of literary geniuses per capita of population? Since the claim is unverifiable, it’s merely propaganda. As rich and complex as anywhere else: why is that not enough for some Scottish critics? * Still angry, Irvine Welsh * Kevin Williamson’s The Scottish Patient radio show 2 * Tom Waits by Tom Waits: “”What’s the most curious record in your collection? In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.” * Powells bring you a Miranda July exclusive * And talk to Alexander Hemon about The Lazarus Project: “The archival photographs come from the archive of the Chicago Historical Society, most of them from the collection that came from the Chicago Daily News, which is long gone. The Chicago Historical Society has about thirty years of photographs from the Daily News. It’s immense; it’s infinite. I looked through their collection a number of times. It’s an amazing place. Many of those photos are from glass plates, not even from film. The other photos came from our trip, from my friend Velibor Božović. He took about twelve hundred photos, and then we picked twelve, from that mountain of photos.” * Do pictures add to a writer’s vision? * The Utne Reader on “hypermodern” collectors (that is, collectors of future lit classics): “Collecting is a risky game, though. ..followers of William T. Vollmann lost big in the 1990s. Ken Lopez, a bookseller who specializes in modern and hypermodern titles, told me of a failed attempt to corner Vollmann futures: “A small group of young guys got together to monopolize the market,” he says. “They would travel to book signings, buy 10 copies of Vollmann’s books for $17.50, and mark the prices up to $100.” But they overshot, and today the market is overstocked, supply having outstripped demand.” [via Largehearted Boy] * Scrabble is sixty * Gloom Cupboard, “literature for the common people” * And it’s goodnight to “that dick” Robert McCrum.
First posted: Tuesday, May 27th, 2008.
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